Evangelising Language Technology: A Practically-Focussed Undergraduate Program

This paper describes an undergraduate program in Language Technology that we have developed at Macquarie University. We question the industrial relevance of much that is taught in NLP courses, and emphasize the need for a practical orientation as a means to growing the size of the field. We argue that a more evangelical approach, both with regard to students and industry, is required. The paper provides an overview of the material we cover, and makes some observations for the future on the basis of our experiences so far.