Your job for this assignment is to track down an interesting NLP tool, and to give a short (5 minutes) report on it. Reports will be in class on Monday, Nov 8.
As you prepare your presentation, think about what you would want to know about a tool you hadn't seen before. Most likely, you would want to know (1) a brief description of what the tool does, (2) a demonstration of its capabilities in some form or other, and (3) any interesting supplementary information that helps pique your interest to investigate it further. In a sense, your presentation should be a 5-minute advertisement for the product.
Note that some tools will be easy to demo--they have a web interface or an easy download, etc. Others might be harder. For example, if the tool is an API, then you'll probably need to show a code snippet that accesses the API, and run the program that the snippet is from to do whatever interesting thing the program does.
When you find a tool that you want to report on, lay claim to it by announcing your tool on the class mailing list cs322-00-f10@lists.carleton.edu.
Of course, search engines may help you with your search, but you also might take a look at the and the Association for Computational Linguistics, or more specifically, the ACL Wiki.
Have fun.