Chris Manning and Dan Jurafsky are running a free online 8-week course on Natural Language Processing to students worldwide, January 23rd – March 18th 2012:
For those of you who know students or colleagues who might be looking for an introduction to NLP next quarter, encourage them to join us and the 40,000 students who have already registered in the course!
Students have access to screencast lecture videos, are given quiz questions, review exams and programming assignments in Java or Python, receive regular feedback on progress, and can participate in a discussion forum.
The course covers a broad range of topics in natural language processing at the advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate level, including word and sentence tokenization, text classification and sentiment analysis, spelling correction, information extraction, parsing, meaning extraction, and question answering, We will also introduce the underlying theory from probability, statistics, and machine learning that are crucial for the field, and cover fundamental algorithms like n-gram language modeling, naive bayes and maxent classifiers, sequence models, probabilistic dependency and constituent parsing, and vector-space models of meaning.
You can find more information about joining at http://www.nlp-class.org/