Learning Computational Linguistics through NLP Evaluation Events: the experience of Russian evaluation initiative

We present in the paper our experience of involving the students of the department of theoretical and computational linguistics of the Moscow State University into full-cycle activities of preparing and evaluating the results of the NLP Evaluation forums, held in 2010 and 2012 in Russia. The forum of 2010 started as a new initiative and was the first independent evaluation of morphology parsers for Russian in Russia. At the same time the forum campaign has been a source of a successful academic course which resulted in a closeknit student team, strong enough to implement the two-year research for the second forum on syntax, held in 2012. The new forum of anaphora (to be held in 2014) is now prepared mostly by students.