Zero to Spoken Dialogue System in One Quarter: Teaching Computational Linguistics to Linguists Using Regulus

This paper describes a Computational Linguistics course designed for Linguistics students. The course is structured around the architecture of a Spoken Dialogue System and makes extensive use of the dialogue system tools and examples available in the Regulus Open Source Project. Although only a quarter long course, students learn Computational Linguistics and programming sufficient to build their own Spoken Dialogue System as a course project.