# Training an NLP Scholar at a Small Liberal Arts College: A Backwards Designed Course Proposal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05664/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Designing and Interpreting Probes with Control Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03368/) (2019)
- [BERTs of a feather do not generalize together: Large variability in generalization across models with similar test set performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02969/) (2019)
- [Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Evaluation of Word Prediction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00187/) (2020)
- [Refining Targeted Syntactic Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09635/) (2021)
- [Studying the Inductive Biases of RNNs with Synthetic Variations of Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06400/) (2019)
- [Evaluation of African American Language Bias in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14291/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Teaching and Critiquing Conceptualization and Operationalization in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18505/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid growth in natural language processing (NLP) over the last couple years has generated student interest and excitement in learning more about the field. In this paper, we present two types of students that NLP courses might want to train. First, an "NLP engineer" who is able to flexibly design, build and apply new technologies in NLP for a wide range of tasks. Second, an "NLP scholar" who is able to pose, refine and answer questions in NLP and how it relates to the society, while also learning to effectively communicate these answers to a broader audience. While these two types of skills are not mutually exclusive -- NLP engineers should be able to think critically, and NLP scholars should be able to build systems -- we think that courses can differ in the balance of these skills. As educators at Small Liberal Arts Colleges, the strengths of our students and our institution favors an approach that is better suited to train NLP scholars. In this paper we articulate what kinds of skills an NLP scholar should have, and then adopt a backwards design to propose course components that can aid the acquisition of these skills.