Design of the Introduction Part of Information Processing and Machine Translation Course for Students Majoring in Computer Science and Technology

Machine translation is the process that the computer transforms one natural language (source language) to another (target language). It is a branch of Computational Linguistics and one of the ultimate goals of the research in Artificial Intelligence. Machine translation is of applicable importance as well as scientific importance. Due to the rapid development of Internet and globalization of economic, machine translation plays an increasingly important role in promoting an open exchange of politics, economy and culture. Therefore, the course of information processing and machine translation has been set up as an elective course for the students of computer science in our university. Around 100 students attend this course each year. The course has demanded considerable investment of time and effort. Introduction is a very important part for a course. It can make the students understand the objectives, tasks, connotation and characteristics of the course. Moreover, the introduction part can provide the students the outline of the course and arouse the students' enthusiasm. This paper introduced the design of the introduction of this course, including subject depending, problem posing, tortuous process, problem of ambiguity, revival of natural language processing, the motive force of modem social progress, perception and cognition, valuable cognitive knowledge, the contribution of natural language processing to knowledge acquisition.