Teaching NLP While Still Learning It

Vincent Runge and I built an NLP course for our master’s students this year. What we didn’t expect was how much we’d learn ourselves — and how much fun that would be.

The phrase “I’m teaching this course” implies that you already know what you’re about to say. Vincent and I discovered, while building our NLP lecture from scratch, that the more honest version sounds more like I’m figuring this out slightly ahead of the students.

We started with a simple ambition — give master’s students a coherent arc from classical word representations to modern Transformer architectures. TF-IDF, LSA, Word2Vec: the historical scaffolding before attention mechanisms took over everything.

What surprised me most, though, was the pleasure of it.

Teaching NLP in 2026 puts me in mildly strange position: some of the tools are already being used to help build better versions of those same tools. The field is recursive, and that was great to explore.