B490 Fall 2012: Course Project

Taken together, this is worth 30% of your course grade!

Project ideas!

Proposal

Due Thursday September 27

• what are you going to do?
• who is in your group? (you should have two or three people)
• find three related papers, put references to them
• how to find papers: use Google Scholar or ACL Anthology!
• what do you think is going to be hard?
• what are you going to do for source control? (seriously.)
• (plain text format is fine)
• Write two or three paragraphs answering all of these questions. Turn it in on oncourse!

Project Ping

Due Tuesday October 30

• Let us know that you've started reading and ideally programming too!
• Summarize the three papers you found; more papers than that is fine too!
• Are the things that you thought would be hard the really hard ones?
• If your project needs data, have you found relevant data? What is it? Do you need help finding more?

Code

(code and writeup are due the last day of class, 6 December)

Write some code. Have documentation so that somebody else (the instructors, or some other students) could run it too.

Here's the thing about the documentation: during the last week of the class, you're going to be given somebody else's project, with instructions. Points and glory deducted if they can't figure out how to run it. That would have been cool. But points and glory will be deducted if the instructors can't figure out how to run your project.

Writeup

Make it look like a conference paper! This is a programming project, so the report can be pretty simple, maybe three or four single-spaced pages. It should have these parts.

• Goals: Describe what the program is supposed to do and (very briefly) how this fits into natural language processing, including issues we discussed in class.
• Related work: thankfully, you've already written this part! Just the three paper summaries from your project ping. You can also say how your work is different, if you want.
• Program: Describe the organization of the program, emphasizing what would not be obvious from the comments in your code.
• Evaluation: Say how well you succeeded and what you learned from doing this. If you failed to achieve what you planned, try to explain why and say what you would do next, if you were continuing work on the project.

Presentation

Be ready to give a presentation on presentation day! We'll schedule these as we get closer.

(policies and some text adapted from Mike Gasser's b651 project page.)