Student Work

Participation: 15%

Your participation in classroom discussions and labs helps you and your classmates understand the material. All students must read the weekly papers, and coming prepared to discuss papers that your colleagues present shows respect for them.

This includes attendance. If you have extenuating circumstances, please email me.

Homework: 30%

We will have six to eight homework assignments over the course of the semester. They involve submitting code, which must run in the class Python 3 environment.

In addition, some involve writing up findings or analysis of your data and system.

Assignments are due via Canvas at 11:59 PM the night before class.

Paper Presentation: 20%

The computational linguistics themes of this class will be explored through academic literature, such as conference papers. Students, alone or as a pair, will present the weekly reading to class and lead a discussion. These presentations will also strengthen your research skills by situating our weekly paper in scholarly context.

Briefing: 20 minutes (one presenter) or 30 minutes (two presenters)

Please use slides to communicate main points. Walk through the most important equations and discuss tables (what are the datasets? metrics?) and graphs (what are the axes?).

In addition to the class paper, you must present a related paper. This could be another work cited by your paper which was important to understanding it. Or, you might find another paper that cites this one that you found interesting (try Google scholar). There won't be enough time to present the full methodology/background/results. Instead focus on how one paper built off the other. If there is one presenter, prepare one context paper; for two presenters, two.

Discussion:

Your classmates are also responsible for reading the weekly paper. Prepare a few discussion questions: how could we extend this paper to our homework or a different dataset? Propose another feature you think the authors might have overlooked. Etc.

Final Project

Your final project may be done individually or in groups of 2 or 3. You will implement a computational linguistics application on your own data.

Hypothesis Presentation: 10%

Each group will present and discuss their final project in our last class period. Some groups may present in the penultimate class period, depending on number of groups. You do not need to have results yet, but please present your data, proposed methodology, and hypothesis.

Use your discussion time to get feedback and advice from your colleagues, and participate in their discussions to help them strengthen their projects.

Code and Write-Ups: 25%

Your final project includes a brief write-up, up to four pages, and a git repository.