The Magpie Lab

Context

• Application Area: Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• History: Eliza (by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1960s), Siri (voice activated commands for iPhone, iPad, etc), Watson (Jeopardy)
• "While NLP is a complicated field, it is fairly easy to create a simple program to respond to English sentences." (from Magpie Student Guide)

Some Topics

• Highlight an interesting application of computing
• Introduce simple elements of parsing and string manipulation
  • search for key phrases
  • restructure user input
• Consider opportunities and limitations of various algorithms
• Connect with AP CS A topics, including conditionals, loops, String class

Materials Provided

• Student Guide
• Teacher Guide
• Suggested multiple choice and free response questions provided
• Software to support 5 activities
• Pointers for further exploration

created 18 January 2013 last revised 1 March 2013

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