This paper describes a new Cornell University course serving as a non-programming introduction to computer science, with natural language processing and information retrieval forming a crucial part of the syllabus. Material was drawn from a wide variety of topics (such as theories of discourse structure and random graph models of the World Wide Web) and presented at some technical depth, but was massaged to make it suitable for a freshman-level course. Student feedback from the first running of the class was overall quite positive, and a grant from the GE Fund has been awarded to further support the course's development and goals.
@inproceedings{Lee:02b, author = {Lillian Lee}, title = {A non-programming introduction to computer science via {NLP}, {IR}, and {AI}}, year = {2002}, pages = {32--37}, booktitle = {ACL Workshop on Effective Tools and Methodologies for Teaching Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics} }