A dissemination workshop for introducing young I talian students to NLP (2021)

Abstract: We describe and make available the game-based material developed for a laboratory run at several Italian science festivals to popularize NLP among young students.

## introduction the present paper aims at describing in detail the teaching materials developed and used for a series of interactive dissemination workshops on nlp and computational linguistics foot_0 . these workshops were designed and delivered by the authors on behalf of the italian association for computational linguistics (ailc, www.ai-lc.it ), with the aim of popularizing natural language processing (nlp) among young italian students (13+) and the general public. the workshops were run in the context of nationwide popular science festivals and open-day events both onsite (at bergamoscienza, and scuola internazionale superiore di studi avanzati [sissa], trieste) and online (at festival della scienza di genova, the bright european researchers' night, high school its tullio buzzi in prato and the second edition of science web festival, engaging over 700 participants in center and northern italy from 2019 to 2021. 2 the core approach of the workshop remained the same throughout all the events. however, the materials and activities were adapted to a variety of different formats and time-slots, ranging from 30 to 90 minutes. we find that this workshop -thanks to its modular nature -can fit different target audiences and different time slots, depending on the level of interactive engagement required from participants and on the level of granularity of the presentation itself. other than on the level of engagement expected of participants, time required can also vary depending on the participants' background and metalinguistic awareness. our interactive workshops took the form of modular games where participants, guided by trained tutors, acted as if they were computers that had to recognize speech and text, as well as to generate written sentences in a mysterious language they knew nothing about. the present contribution only describes the teaching materials and provide a general outline of the activities composing the workshop. for a detailed discussion and reflection on the workshop genesis and goals and on how it was received by the participants see @xcite . the teaching support consist in an interactive presentation plus hands-on material, either in hardcopy or digital form. we share a sample presentation foot_2 and an open-access repository foot_3 containing both printable materials to download and scripts to reproduce them on different input data. ## workshop and materials the activity contains both more theoretical and hands-on parts, which are cast as games. ## activity preparation the preparation of the activity consists of several steps: (1) creating and tagging the corpora with morpho-syntactic and syntactic categories as described in the repository; (2) choosing the words to include in the card decks: these must be manually selected but scripts are provided to generate possible sentences based on bigram co-occurrences, and to extract all the possible grammar rules present in the annotation; (3) when the produced sentences and grammar are satisfactory, scripts are provided to generate (i) the printable formats of corpora and decks of cards, (ii) a dictionary to support the translation of sentences in the last part of the workshop, and (iii) clear-text corpora; (4) sentences from the clear-text corpora have to be manually cut and glued on a transparent support that can be superimposed on the printed corpora to reveal the sentences; (5) finally, some manual work is necessary: producing strips of felt or any material with the same colors used in the corpus; cutting threads; attaching a button loop to the relevant cards, etc. ## reusability in the spirit of open science and to encourage the popularization of nlp, the teaching materials and source code are freely available in our repository (see footnotes 2-3 for the links). the print-ready material is released under cc by-nc; the source code is distributed under the gnu gpl license version 3. all scripts work for python versions 3.6 or above and the overall process requires python3, lualatex, pdftk and pdfnup as detailed in the readme.md file in the repository, which contains all necessary instructions.