Four-Day NLP++ Workshop at RVCE University
Computer science students at RVCE University in Bengaluru India were given an up-close look at NLP++, the universal programming language for text and NLP, by co-authors David de Hilster and Amnon Meyers. This was the first NLP++ workshop offered for college credit.
NLUGLI and RVCE Memorandum of Understanding
Back in 2024, the Natural Language Understanding Global Initiative and RVCE University signed a Memorandum of Understanding intended to establish a long-term relationship. David de Hilster had already been working with Dean Shobha for several years. Dr. Merin Thomas has shown renewed interest in NLP++, given her work with other professors on dictionaries for numerous Indian languages.
De Hilster has transitioned to academics from industry, where he had spent more than 40 years in AI and NLP. He will continue promoting NLUGI and NLP++ around the world, now as a faculty member of Northeastern University in Miami.
Hearing from the Authors Themselves
It is rare for students to learn a new programming language from the authors themselves. But that is exactly what students from the College of Engineering at RV University experienced via this workshop. David de Hilster and Amnon Meyers gave students an up-close tour of VisualText, the VSCode Language Extension for NLP++. De Hilster then demoed various NLP++ applications, including a simple date and time analyzer and a more advanced co-reference analyzer that finds and correlates information about people throughout a text.
De Hilster also built two systems from scratch: one parsing plain text taken from a previously formatted file (such as MS Word), and a second that deduced co-reference relationships, as before, while simultaneously updating a knowledge base.
On the last day, de Hilster showed various ways in which the NLP Engine can be called from Python, either using a special NLP++ python class or using a native NLPPlus Python Package.
During the workshop, de Hilster and Meyers encouraged workshop students to contribute to NLUGI by creating dictionaries, knowledge bases (KBs), and analyzers for their native languages in India, including English. These resources can then become part of the NLP++ open source environment, which is available to all users of the NLP++ language extension for VSCode.
Feedback from Students and Professors
A post-workshop survey of students revealed an interest in future courses using NLP++. More than 60% of the students expressed interest in a full course for NLP++, while half showed interest in a general rule-based NLP course using NLP++.
Also, students were invited to express their interest in working directly with NLP++ authors David and Amnon and helping with NLUGI.
RVCE Professors, including Dr. Merin Thomas, also expressed interest in further collaborations with NLUGI. At the end of the workshop, she expressed her gratitude and expected that further collaborations would lie ahead.
What Was Learned
The NLP++ workshop at RVCE University marked a significant milestone in NLP education: this was the first time students learning NLP++ earned college credits. De Hilster and Meyers learned much from this first attempt at teaching NLP++ in a short workshop format.
“NLP++ is so different from other languages, Amnon and I often forget that what seems simple to us, is simple because we have worked with NLP++ for more than two decades. I now know that in a short amount of time, such as a workshop or even hackathon, we need to simplify the examples and introduce real solutions to students as quickly as possible. I have been giving talks on NLP++ that have been more of a broad survey, instead of teaching NLP++ in a short format. Shorter workshops need to be simplified and compared to other NLP technologies out there. There is a clear path for this, now that we have wetted our feet. If we can interest students in a small amount of time, this can open up longer-form, full NLP and NLP++ classes.”
-David de Hilster
De Hilster also plans to convene a university-student working group tasked with designing an NLP++ Hackathon for high school and college students, as well as a project to develop online dictionary building tools, leading to a crowd-sourcing project for building NLP++ dictionaries for the world’s languages.
