Course Projects

Final Report Instructions

Due Thursday 12/19 11:59PM Anywhere on Earth. Submission Site

No less than 4 pages (excluding references) of ACL format template (same as proposal). You may reuse any text from proposal you like. It should contain the following


  • Introduction
    • This should be about 0.75 page covering the following:
      • What is the problem you are trying to solve / problem you are studying?
      • Why is the problem you are solving / studying important?
      • What is motivating your proposed approach?
      • Give a brief description of your proposed approach
      • Give a brief summary of the results you achieved experimentally
  • Approach
    • This should be around 1 or 2 pages
    • There should be at least 1 section covering the methodology that you have developed or that you have studied.
      • Give the reader sufficient background on important or non-standard concepts.
      • Describe your approach in detail
      • Motivate design decisions
      • You must include:
        • A figure illustrating your proposed approach and a separate figure illustrating the data your approach is applied to.
        • OR if you believe it is better to combine these two figures into a single figure that is also allowed.
  • Experiments
    • This should be around 1 or 2 pages
    • Describe the datasets you are using in detail
    • Describe the baseline methods you are comparing to
    • Describe the metrics on which you are evaluating
    • Present the results you have in tables and/or figures
    • Describe why you believe the results are what they are.
    • You must include:
      • An example “eye candy” figure of your model’s predictions or output, i.e. an example of how your approach performs on the data you care about.
      • This most likely should also show what a baseline model would do on the same data
      • If you do not believe that this can apply to your project, please contact the TAs.
  • Related work
    • Survey of related work, Between 0.5 and 1 page.
  • Conclusions & Future work
    • A paragraph to 0.5 pages
    • Short summary of results
    • At least 3 concrete next steps that should be done for your project that you did not have time to do in the semester.

Project Proposal Instructions

Due Friday 9/27 at 5pm ET. Submission Site

Please include the following in your project proposal:

  • Title for your project (this can also change later on). Something descriptive but also memorable.
  • Introduction section which must contain the following subsections:
    • Task / Research Question Description: What is the task you are trying to solve or what is the research question you are trying to answer?
    • Motivation & Limitations of existing work: Have others tried to solve the same task or answer a similar research question? What are you trying to do differently and why? What were the limitations or shortcomings of prior work?
    • Proposed Approach: Briefly describe some of your initial thoughts about your proposed approach and your preliminary ideas
    • Likely challenges and mitigations: What is hard about this task / research question? What are your contingency plans if things turn out to be harder than expected or experiments do not go as planned?
  • Related Work Section
    • Include 2-3 sentence descriptions of no less than 4 relevant papers. Also mention how your work differs from these.
  • Experiments section
    • Datasets - Please list which datasets you plan to use , whether or not you have access them, and whether or not they are publicly available with the same preprocessing and train / dev / tests as the previous work you will be comparing to (if applicable).
    • Baselines - Please list the baseline methods (if applicable) that you will compare to, importantly state whether or not you will need to run their method on new datasets or if you have already published results. Also list if they have publicly available source code that can be used to run experiments.
    • Software - Please list some of the software libraries / components / existing code that you will be building your project off of. Timeline - Please provide a week-by -week timeline for the next few weeks leading up to the midpoint presentations on 10/18. What experiments will you do each week? What would you like to have accomplished by the midterm? How will you implement an end-to-end If you're in a team how will you divide up the work?

Template File: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1a-ejT0D1VC2PPe13L5hLGEszzXLCUAOU?usp=sharing