Special Topics: Human-Centered NLP
Course Information
Course Number
HCI Undergraduate:
05-499 D
HCI Graduate:
05-899 D
Course Description
"HCI people design useful things that NLP people cannot build; NLP people make things that nobody uses.” (Yang et al., 2019) This course aims to help students develop the mindsets and skills necessary to build useful NLP systems, by exploring the intersection between HCI and NLP. The course will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the status quo NLP techniques in interactive scenarios -- with a focus on LLMs and their applications, which has inspired profound transformation in the field of human-AI interaction. We will also discuss ways to integrate humans into designing, developing, and evaluating NLP resources, models, and systems. Importantly, it will highlight topics shared between HCI and NLP (agents, model trust, task delegation, data curation, etc.) and reflect on how the two communities approach similar topics differently. The primary goal of the course is to offer an overview of HCI+NLP, and to help students get access to, and understand, both HCI and NLP research papers and methods. The course will be half lecture and half seminar style – every 1-2 weeks, students will sign up to lead the discussion of certain given papers. Coursework includes lectures, paper readings, class presentations, and group projects; It will not contain exams.
Prerequisites
The class expects reasonable basic programming skills and familiarity with machine learning concepts.
Semester Offered and Units
Semester:
Fall 2025
Undergraduate:
12
units
Graduate:
12
units
Enrollment Requirements
Students should have taken at least one introduction to Machine Learning class and understand the basics of model training and evaluation, and should feel comfortable doing programming.
Skills
As a semi-seminar class (e.g. requires reading papers and doing discussions), it will be more ideal for students who have experience or are interested in doing research in this field.
Syllabus
The syllabus can be found here.