CSE 40657/60657
Project

Throughout the course, you will develop an application of NLP techniques to a topic of interest to you.

• You may work alone or in pairs as long as you clearly define which person did which parts of the work. Each person should contribute equally. (If an undergraduate and graduate student work together, the graduate student should contribute roughly 2/3.)
• It’s not acceptable to do the same work for this project and another class’s project, but it’s acceptable (and encouraged) for this project to relate to another project as long as the boundary is clearly defined.

Idea

Due: Week of 8/29

For the first milestone, you will choose a problem to work on (and collaborator, if any). The deadline is intentionally set too early for you to know how to solve your problem. We just want to know what you're interested in! It is okay to change later on. Length guideline: ½–1 page per undergraduate, 1–2 pages per graduate.

• What are you trying to do? Describe your goal without using any jargon.
• Write (or draw) an example of the envisioned input/output or user interaction.
• If your project is successful, how will it be helpful to people?

Please submit your idea in Sakai as a PDF file (not doc or docx) named pm1-netid.pdf.

Baseline

Due: Week of 10/10

For the second milestone, you should have everything ready that you need to start experimenting with solutions to your problem. Describe what you've done so far. Length guideline: ½–1 page per undergraduate, 1–2 pages per graduate.

For 95% of projects, this means that you must answer the following:

• What data will you use? Include URLs or LDC catalog numbers. Describe whatever preprocessing steps you used on the data (e.g., cleaning, tokenization).
• What metric(s) will you use to measure success?
• What baseline method will you compare against? This should be something that you can implement in about one hour.
• How well does your baseline method perform (using your evaluation metric)?

For a minority of projects, the above will not apply; please speak to Prof. Chiang about what to submit.

Please submit your work in Sakai as a PDF file (not doc or docx) named pm2-netid.pdf.

Presentation

Due: Second half of semester

Your presentation should be no more than 5 minutes per person, plus 5 minutes per person for discussion. It is okay if some of the work presented isn’t finished yet. Presentation dates are scattered throughout the second half of the semester. If you choose an early date, you will get feedback that you can actually implement!

You should present:

• Goal: What are you trying to do (using no jargon)?
• Method: How are you trying to do it (briefly)?
• Experiments: How well does it work (so far)?
• Conclusions: What did you learn from your experiments (so far)?

Please submit your slides in Sakai, in any format, with the filename pm3-netid.{pdf,pptx,...}.

Report

Due: 12/13

Length guideline: 2–4 pages per undergraduate student, 4–8 pages per graduate student.

• Goal: What are you trying to do (using no jargon)? Give an example of inputs/outputs or user interaction. How might it be helpful to people?
• Method: How are you trying to solve the problem? What are existing approaches to the problem? (Graduate students should provide a comprehensive review.)
• Experiments: What data do you use? What metric(s) do you use to measure success? What baseline method do you compare against? How well do your methods perform compared with the baseline, and why?
• Conclusions: What did you learn from your experiments?
• Replicability: Submit (or include links to) all the code that you wrote and all the data that you used.

Please submit your report in Sakai as a PDF file (not doc or docx) named pm4-netid.pdf.