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<Paper uid="W02-0110">
  <Title>Formal Language Theory for Natural Language Processing</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Enrollment data
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    <Paragraph position="0"> While the Summer School does not conduct teaching evaluations, I felt that it would be useful to receive feedback from participants of the course. To this end, I designed a standard teaching evaluation form and asked students to fill it in on the last class.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The data in this section are drawn from the students' responses.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The number of students who submitted the questionnaire was 52. Nationality was varied, with the majority from Finland, Poland, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, but also from Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Romania, France, Estonia, Korea, Iran, the Ukraine, Belgium, Japan, Sweden, Russia and Denmark.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Thirty six defined themselves as graduate students, thirteen as undergraduates and three as post-PhD.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The most interesting item was background. Participants had to describe their backgrounds by choosing from Linguistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Logic or Other. Only 32% described their background as Linguistics; 29% chose Computer Science; 21% chose Mathematics; and 15% --Logic. Other backgrounds included mostly Philosophy but also Biology and Physics. Why students of Computer Science, and in particular graduate students, should take Formal Language Theory in such an interdisciplinary Summer School is unclear to me.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Students were asked to grade their impression of the course, on a scale of 1-5, along the following dimensions: a88 The course is interesting a88 The course covers important and useful material null a88 The course progresses at the right pace a88 The course is fun The average grade was 4.53 for the interest question; 4.47 for the usefulness question; 3.67 for the pace question; and 4.13 for fun. These results show that participants felt that the course was interesting and useful, and even fun. However, many of them felt that it did not progress in the right pace. This might be partially attributed to the high rate of computer science and mathematics students in the audience: many of them must have seen the material earlier, and felt that progress was too slow for them.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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