Dalhousie University    [  http://web.cs.dal.ca/~vlado/csci6509/project.html  ]
Winter 2013 (Jan7-Apr8)
Faculty of Computer Science
Dalhousie University

CSCI 4152/6509 - Course Project

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The course project for graduate students (CSCI 6509) should follow the basic structure of a typical research project, such as the research work on a thesis, only on a smaller scale. The undergraduate students (CSCI 4152) can choose as well to do a research project, or they can do an implementation-focused project, which would follow the structure of a software development project.

You can form project teams of up to four students, or work individually.

The final paper should be in the form of a technical report. The graduate students will give individual presentations, following duration and format of a short conference presentation. The presentation should last up to 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes reserved for questions. Undergraduate students can present project as a team, or individually.

Regarding presentation dates, please take a look at the free time slots on the course calendar and let me know by email your preference. The presentations will be scheduled based on first-come-first-served basis.

Deliverables

Note about emails: All emails related to the course must have the course number included in the subject, such as CSCI4152, CSCI6509, or, the best option, CSCI4152/6509.

In more details, your subject lines for required deliverables must be:

P0 – Project Topic Proposal

Worth: 1% of the final mark.

You will need to choose a topic for your project. Send me by e-mail in plain text the following information:

  1. tentative title,
  2. the list of team members, and
  3. one paragraph description of the topic.
Please do this as soon as you have chosen a topic. If two or more projects have the same or very similar topic, the one that sends P0 later may be required to change the topic. If the topic is not sufficiently relevant to the course, you may be asked to change it.

P1 – Project Statement

Worth: 3% for CSCI4152, or 5% for CSCI6509, of the final mark.

The project statement should be sent by email and printed as well. Bring printed version to the class. It should be about 2 pages long. It must include:

  1. Project title,
  2. Names of the member(s) of the group,
  3. Problem statement,
  4. List of possible approaches with citations to relevant work,
  5. Project plan for the rest of the term, and
  6. List of references.
The statement should identify a feasible project. P1 will be marked based on its completeness, clarity of presentation, and research on and analysis of related work.

P – Oral Presentation

Worth: 10% of the final mark, including class participation.

You are required to submit the slides of the presentation at least 24 hours before your presentation by email to the instructor. The slides can be original slides, or an slides handout (e.g., 6 slides per page), and they must be in a PowerPoint or PDF format. I will assume that you will use your computer for presentation, but if you need a computer you can use instructor's computer. If you use instructor's computer, you can only use PDF or PowerPoint slides, without use of Internet or running any other programs.

Duration: The presentations should last 10 minutes, with 5 additional minutes reserved for questions and speaker switch.

Content: There is a significant flexibility in choosing the topic of your presentation, but it should be related to the project. It could be the work you have done up to that time, or simply what you plan to do. It is a good idea to include research or other related work that you did so far. You could also present a related method from the textbook or another paper.

Evaluation scheme for presentations:

R – Project Report

Worth: grads 24% / ugrads 16% of the final mark.

The written project report is submitted in printed and electronic form; i.e., in class and by email. The reports are kept in archive with the instructor for several years.

A typical structure of a research project is:

This structure is just a guideline and parts may not be relevant to your project. There are not fixed requirements about the length of the paper, since it may depend on the type of the project and number of people in a group. It is expected that a project report contains at least 8 pages, and it may be sufficient for an A+ project if some implementational or experimental work has been done.

General Guidelines Regarding Project Topic

A typical research project should be based on the following:

  1. Choose an NLP-related problem that is important and interesting in your opinion. You should have some ideas about how it could be solved, and about what interesting results you could obtain by the end of term. The discussed problem should be feasible in this sense, but it should not be trivial.
  2. The next step is to search through existing published work and find out about existing solutions on the same problem, or to the closest similar problem. You can start with the textbook. You may decide to change your focus if you discover that the problem is already solved in a satisfactory way, or if it is a special case of a more general problem that is already solved. Even if there are existing solutions, you may have an idea about a simpler solution, or an approach with a different advantage, and may want to test it.
  3. Design you method(s), implement it, and run experiments.
  4. Analyze results. Revisit your methodology if needed.
  5. Finish the report. Keep writing during the term.

While the above guidelines describe a typical research project in NLP, you can also consider some alternative forms:

Alternative Project Types

Resources

  1. NLP Research Links on the course web page
  2. http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/ — ACL Anthology
  3. Google scholar and other scientific Internet resources

Topics of Some Previous Course Projects

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