Semester Course Project (55% of total grade)

Students will design and carry out a research project that aims to answer a question in natural language processing (Learning Objective O4). Students must work in teams of six people on their project.

Project description:

The focus of the class project can be research-focused or application-focused. The project involves identifying a communication or exploration need that language could resolve, data sources available to inform the problem and method, and the techniques needed to approach it. The grading distribution for deliverables of the course project as well as expectations for each deliverable are detailed below.

A research-focused project will develop models and analyze data of an existing problem in NLP, or formulate a new problem altogether.

An application-focused project will train (possibly only fine-tuning) and deploy NLP models to new application areas, while not necessarily developing any novel research question to be answered. Students will leverage tools, concepts, and techniques presented in the class.

The deliverables include:

• Project proposal (1-page single space)
• Project midterm report (4-page single space)
• Project midterm presentation (timed, 2-slide brief update, with questions)
• Project final presentation (timed, with time for questions)
• Project final report (8 pages single space for the main document, up to 15 with appendix/figures).

Project proposal

The project proposal (1 page, single-space, 10pt font size) should outline the type of project (research-focused or application-focused), and then answer the following questions clearly in a sentence and/or a few paragraphs each, as appropriate: What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon. How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice? What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful? Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make? What are the risks? What could go wrong, and how will you pivot early on if that happens? How much will it cost? That is, what resources will you need in terms of time and computation? Are these reasonable for a semester and what access you have? Identify two milestones along the way to your finished project.

Project midterm presentation

The project midterm presentation (2min presentation with 2 slides + 1min FAQ) will be given by your team in class and graded on clarity, novelty, and presentation quality (by instructor and TA). 1 member from the team can do the presentation representing the whole team. Your presentation should convey:

• Slide 1: An overview of the problem and your method (and differentiation with prior work)
• Slide 2: the main takeaway you have reached with your project so far; and an overview of what remains to be done before the final report.

Project midterm report

The project midterm report (4 pages, single-space, 10pt font size) should cover these questions in detail: What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon. Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make? Additionally, it should cover related work in detail, as well as document the proposed method and what is new in that approach, as well as how you plan to conduct experiments, what hypotheses these experiments test, and how you will evaluate the quality of the results. If you have preliminary results to report, they should be discussed here. Additionally, you should revisit your milestones from the proposal and document your progress with respect to these, and propose updated milestones for the remainder of the semester.

Project final presentation

The project final presentation (6min presentation with 5 slides + 2min FAQ) will be given by your team in class and graded on clarity, completeness, and presentation quality (by instructor and TA). 2-3 members max from the team can do the presentation representing the whole team. Your presentation should convey: the main takeaway you have reached or aim to reach with your project; a brief motivation which can include some background; the key insight that overcomes the problems presented in the motivation with what was done before this project; the technical details behind the insight; and an overview of what remains to be done before the final report.

Project final report

The project final report (8 pages, single-space, 10pt font size, with up to 15 pages appendix and reference) should answer all the following questions in detail, and is expected to include revised content from the midterm report based on feedback your team received at that time. What were you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon. Who cares? If you were successful, what difference would it make? How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice? What is new in your approach and why did you think it would be successful? How did you conduct experiments? What hypotheses did those experiments test? How did you evaluate the quality of the results? What are the results of your experiments? What did you discover? Were you able to support your hypotheses? What are the main takeaways of your project? What would you do next if you wanted to keep working in this space? What new questions can you formulate given the work this semester?

Grading breakdown of the course project:

The project is total 55% of final grade with the following breakdown: