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Course Project

Overview

Your course project will hopefully be a fun investigation of some novel aspect of text mining and language processing. There are only two requirements for your project:
  • They should be related to something we have studied or will study in this class, or some other topic that is of interest to the text mining community.

  • There should be some element of research, meaning that the project should investigate something novel. Alternatively, it should involve a significant engineering effort.

Timeline

  • Thursday, September 18: Determine your project teams.

  • Thursday, October 9:: Project proposals are due.

  • Thursday, November 6: Mid-term report on project progress is due.

  • Thursday, December 4: 15-20 minute oral presentation of your project and results.

  • Monday, December 15: Final Report due.

Project Proposal

Your project proposal should be succinct. Please turn in at most two pages with standard margins, single-spaced, with at least 10 point font. I encourage you to schedule a meeting with me and your project team before the proposals are due, so that we can discuss whether your idea is of the appropriate scope for this course.

Your proposal should contain at least the following information:
  • A description of the problem you are trying to solve.
  • The motivation for this problem: why is this an important problem?
  • The approach you plan to take to solve this problem.
  • A schedule for what you plan to have completed by what date.
  • A sketch of how you plan to evaluate your solution.
  • A list of at least 2 related papers.
  • A list of resources you will need and do not already have.

Project Ideas

You are encouraged to be creative with your projects, and to come up with your own project ideas. You are also encouraged to discuss your ideas with me before you turn them into a proposal. Please refer to the Blackboard site of the course for descriptions of my suggestions for project ideas. (Coming soon.)

Mid-term Project Report

In order to check on your progress and help identify any problems as early as possible, I am asking that you turn in a progress report roughly half-way through the time alloted to complete your project. The report should include a description of the milestones you have accomplished so far, out of the set of goals from your project proposal, and it should include a description of any unforeseen problems that you have encountered. Also, give a brief schedule of what you will tackle for the rest of the project.

Project Presentation

December 4, 4:40pm (in class)
On Dec. 4, each project team will give a presentation about their course project.

Format (subject to change):

  • The presentations will last for 12 minutes each, followed by a 3-5 minute period for questions.

  • It is up to the team to decide how to divide the presentation among individual members. However, every member must speak for part of the presentation.

  • Use slides to display your results, at the very least.

Content:

Your presentation should include information on the following --
  • Problem statement and definition
  • Motivation
  • Contributions of the project
  • Methods
  • Experiments and Results
  • Related Work

Project Report

Due December 15 at 6pm
Together with your project presentation, the project report will form the bulk of your project grade. It should be roughly `half' of a conference paper, both in content and in the amount of work done.

Format:

  • The report should be formatted according to any major conference's style guidelines. Here is the latex style file for SIGMOD, the premiere conference in databases. You may use this if you like; or else simply format your paper to look like one of the conference papers we have read.

  • 4 pages Max, including references, figures, and everything else

Content:

Your report should include the content from your presentation, as well as references to related work.

Evaluation

You will be graded on three key factors: 1) How clear and understandable is the material that you produced? 2) How well does your work address the project goals? 3) How informative and helpful is your work for someone else who is working on the same or very similar problems?

Project presentations will be graded in part by your peers. I will hand out evaluation forms with simple questions to be answered about every project. The peer evaluations will significantly influence your grade on the presentations, although I don't yet know by how much.

Every team member will receive the same grade for the proposal, presentation, and report.

The overall project grade will be determined as follows: 10% for the proposal, 40% for the presentation, and 50% for the report.