Due: March 9, 2022.
The project proposal counts for 5% of the course grade.
The proposal describes your plan for the research project. As a plan it is subject to change and does not represent a firm commitment, but it should show that you’ve thought through the relevant aspects of your research. The proposal should be written after you have received some feedback from your assigned TA about the general direction of your project.
The proposal should be written in English using your best academic style, on 1-2 pages with 11-point font, 1-inch margins (find the template below); a second page is allowed only for references, division of labor and timeframe analysis. The proposal should include the following components.
Title for the project.
Motivation of a specific problem that the project will consider.
The problem must involve the use of real-world natural language data, and must include some interesting or non-trivial components. For example: use of multiple or low-resource languages; creation of a new dataset; achieving state-of-the-art performance on an existing dataset; or something else that is interesting or non-trivial.
The proposal should describe the problem, why it is interesting or challenging, what existing work has been done, and how your contribution relates to that.
If the work is related to something you have done in the past, explain how the current work extends it.
Design of the project, including:
Materials such as a specific corpus of language data that you can get access to or collect yourself, and any annotations the data has or needs.
Procedure for processing your data, including algorithms, features, tools, and any annotations you will carry out (if needed).
A plan for evaluation of your work, for example the system’s performance, the annotation procedure (if needed), the measures used for evaluation, and a baseline the system can be compared to.
Analysis of the project, including the feasibility of implementing it within the allotted time, potential difficulties, alternative plans, and implications.
References cited (on second page).
Division of labor between the teammates (on second page).
Latex and word templates: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ePvfy8lJqSVIKxBNPj8BpaB4s3fk0zXV?usp=sharing
Submit the proposal as a PDF file using the “Project Proposal” assignment on Blackboard. Make sure that it is in PDF format (with other formats like Word, Blackboard sometimes messes up the pagination).
The grade for the proposal will be broken down as follows, using the rubric in Blackboard.
20% Motivation: a clearly articulated problem with real-world implications.
20% Design: appropriate considerations for materials, procedure, and evaluation.
20% Analysis: feasibility, alternative plans, and implications.
20% Creativity and thoroughness.
20% Quality and clarity of writing.
You will receive written feedback about your proposal, which should help you with writing the final report; however, feedback on the proposal might take some time, so don’t delay collecting your data and implementing your system while waiting for comments on your proposal.