In the natural language processing field, as well as in machine learning and artificial intelligence in general, it is extremely important to keep yourself up-to-date. Reading research papers is a great way of doing so.
As part of the mandatory course project, each group should choose a research paper from a list of conferences that will be provided later, read and understand it, and record and submit a short video with the paper presentation. In this post I am providing pointers to two excellent resources about how to read scientific papers.
You can read this excellent post by prof. Jason Eisner, CS professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Alternatively, you can have a look at the 1 hour video linked below, by dr. Andrew Ng, adjunct professor at Stanford University and co-founder and head of Google Brain. The video is a lecture from Stanford CS230 Deep Learning course.