From NLTK

NLTK provides ready-to-use courseware and a flexible framework for project work. Students augment and replace existing components, learn structured programming by example, and manipulate sophisticated models from the outset.

Distributing NLTK to Students

NLTK is easy to install; simply refer students to the installation instructions, or distribute CD-ROMs containing Python and NLTK (ISO image).

Tutorials and Exercises

NLTK comes with extensive documentation, including a book with many exercises with a range of difficulties. You may distribute these materials to students, and assign a selection of exercises.

Assignments and Projects

NLTK can be used to create student assignments and projects of varying difficulty and scope; here are some project ideas.

• In the simplest assignments, students experiment with an existing module. The wide variety of existing modules provide many opportunities for creating these simple assignments.
• Once students become more familiar with the toolkit, they can be asked to make minor changes or extensions to an existing module.
• A more challenging task is to develop a new module. Here, NLTK provides some useful starting points: predefined interfaces and data structures, and existing modules that implement the same interface. (Please submit student projects for inclusion in NLTK.)

Demonstrations

NLTK provides graphical tools that can be used in class demonstrations to help explain basic NLP concepts and algorithms. These interactive tools can be used to display relevant data structures and to show the step-by-step execution of algorithms. Both data structures and control flow can be easily modified during the demonstration, in response to questions from the class. Since these graphical tools are included with the toolkit, they can also be used by students. This allows students to experiment at home with the algorithms that they have seen presented in class.

See the Getting Started page for information about how to run the demonstrations.

Slides

Presentation slides are in preparation; some are already available here (latex beamer format). Other slides may be available via the web pages of other courses using NLTK.

Courses

Many courses use NLTK; here is a list of the courses we are aware of.