Occam's Razor and Bender and Koller's Octopus
Incremental educational resource for teaching NLP concepts to undergraduates.
The paper addresses teaching the arguments from Bender and Koller's ACL 2020 paper on natural language understanding, providing teaching materials for undergraduate students to engage with counter-arguments.
We discuss the teaching of the discussion surrounding Bender and Koller's prominent ACL 2020 paper, "Climbing toward NLU: on meaning form, and understanding in the age of data" \cite{bender2020climbing}. We present what we understand to be the main contentions of the paper, and then recommend that the students engage with the natural counter-arguments to the claims in the paper. We attach teaching materials that we use to facilitate teaching this topic to undergraduate students.