⭐ The below is drawn from the requirements for CS224U and CS384.
General
The final project is the main assignment of the course. Projects are required to be related in a reasonable way to at least one of the central topics of the course or related to human factors via the lens of computation. Final projects can be done in groups of 1–3 people; in our experience, groups of 3 lead to the best outcomes, so we encourage you to form a team of that size. Each project team will be assigned a mentor (a member of the teaching team), who will provide feedback on all their project-related work and generally be available.
Submission Format
The literature review, experiment protocol, and final paper must use the ACL submission format and abide by all the ACL requirements except where we have specified otherwise.
1. Literature Review (Apr 24th, 23:59pm PT)
This is a short paper (4~5 pages, excluding references) summarizing and synthesizing several papers in the area of your final project. As noted above, 8 pages is the maximum allowed length. Groups of one should review 5 papers, groups of two should review 7 papers, and groups of three should review 9.
The ideal is to have the same topic for your lit review and final project, but it's possible that you'll discover in the lit review that your topic isn't ideal for you, so you can switch topics (or groups) for the final project; your lit review will be graded on its own terms.
Some suggestion highlights on literature review structure from Chris Potts and Bill MacCartney from CS224U (check out lots of useful material there and there):
- General problem/task definition: What are these papers trying to solve, and why?
- Concise summaries of the articles: Do not simply copy the article text in full. We can read them ourselves. Put in your own words the major contributions of each article.
- Compare and contrast: Point out the similarities and differences of the papers. Do they agree with each other? Are results seemingly in conflict? If the papers address different subtasks, how are they related? (If they are not related, then you may have made poor choices for a lit review...). This section is probably the most valuable for the final project, as it can become the basis for a literature review section..
- Future work: Make several suggestions for how the work can be extended. Are there open questions to answer? How do the papers relate to your final project idea?
- References section: The entries should appear alphabetically and give at least full author name(s), year of publication, title, and outlet if applicable (e.g., journal name or proceedings name). Beyond that, we are not picky about the format. Electronic references are fine but need to include the above information in addition to the link.
2. Experiment Protocol (👉 May 22nd, 23:59pm PT)
This is a short, structured report (6~8 pages, excluding references) designed to help you establish your core experimental/computational framework.
Required sections:
- Research Questions: A statement of the project's core research questions.
- Data: A description of the dataset(s) that the project will use for either the analyses or evaluations.
- Methods or Approaches: A description of the methods or approaches that you'll be using, and a preliminary description of the approach that will be the focus of your investigation. At this early stage, some aspects of these approaches might not yet be worked out, so preliminary descriptions are fine.
- Discussion: An explanation of how the data and approach come together to help answer or evaluate your core research questions.
- Summary of Progress: what you have been done, what you still need to do, and any obstacles or concerns that might prevent your project from coming to fruition.
- References: In the same format as for literature review.
3. Final Paper (June 12th, 23:59pm PT)
The final paper should be 8 pages long, in ACL submission format and adhering to ACL guidelines concerning references, layout, supplementary materials, and so forth. We'll provide additional guidance on writing up final papers.
There are two required paper sections that are special to our course:
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Ethical Consideration: Please write an explicit discussion section of any potential ethical issues, such as around the ethical implication of the project, the use of the data, and potential applications of your work. Here are some recommendations from ACL's ethics guideline: "Ethical questions may arise when working with a variety of types of computational work with language, including (but not limited to) the collection and release of data, inference of information or judgments about individuals, real-world impact of the deployment of language technologies, and environmental consequences of large-scale computation."
- Authorship statement: At the end of your paper (after the 'Acknowledgments' section in the template), please include a brief authorship statement, explaining how the individual authors contributed to the project. You are free to include whatever information you deem important to convey. For guidance, see the second page, right column, of this guidance for PNAS authors (p. 12). We are requiring this largely because we think it is a good policy in general. This statement is required even for singly-authored papers, because we want to know whether your project is a collaboration with people outside of the class. Only in extreme cases, and after discussion with the team, would we consider giving separate grades to team members based on this statement.