Information About Project Proposals

Your proposal should be approximately 3-5 pages in length, and should help me understand both what you hope to accomplish, and how you plan to accomplish it. Please use the following structure, to help me evaluate whether I think your proposal is both interesting and feasible:

• Title Page: Include a title, state which of the four types of projects you will do, identify any partners, and provide a short abstract. (Only one proposal per team is needed.)
• Intellectual Merit: Clearly and specifically state the goals of the project, then explain your project's significance by comparing your research to the prior literature. Do not just list and summarize previous work; instead compare the prior work to your proposed research. This section should provide sufficient background to motivate your work, and should answer the following questions: What problem are you trying to solve? Why is solving this problem important? What do you hope to learn by conducting this project? Although you don't yet know your results, you should know their format (e.g., "Method A outperforms Method B under condition X").
• Resources: Describe the resources (data, systems, knowledge resources, etc.) that you will use and your plans for acquiring or creating them.
• Research Plan: Describe your methodology as well as your plans for evaluation, as appropriate for the type of project. Then define at a technical level the tasks that need to be done as part of your project. Each task should be numbered and described in detail. If there is more than one team member, your proposal should state what each person will do. For example, if an empirical project, what experiments will you conduct? What do you hope to learn from each experiment? What evaluation metrics will you use? What are some appropriate baselines and/or upperbounds for the evaluation? Etc.
• Deliverables: Describe the deliverables that you will produce. Learned features or a learned model? Quantitative and/or qualitative evaluations? Implemented software? A coding manual and annotated corpus? Etc.
• Schedule: Describe the time required to conduct each of the tasks outlined in your Research Plan, and estimate completion dates for each of your Deliverables.
• References: The prior sections should include citations to relevant literature that you both have and plan to read, which are summarized in your bibliography. These should include at least one meaningful citation to a paper from the class readings to ensure that you work on something related to the course.
• Appendix: Discuss any related work you are doing for another class or research project, and contrast that work with what you plan to do for your course project. It is fine to do something related to an existing project, but your course project may not be work or results you (or a partner) are already performing for another class or research project. For example, if you are already performing an annotation study, you could propose to develop an annotation scheme for related information, and add your new types of annotations to your existing data. Or, if you are already working on an NLP system, you could propose to augment it with processing that you did not already plan to add this semester.

Below are specific comments about specific types of projects which are in addition to the specifications above:

• Project Option 2: Specify the input and output of the system. Also, specify the type of strategy your system will use to perform its task, and the types of knowledge your system will use to perform it. If you are implementing an existing algorithm, include comments about which aspects you may focus on more than others, or other ways you may modify the algorithm or its use. If you are running new experiments, please state your hypothesis or hypotheses about what your experiments will show.
• Project Option 3: Specify the application system, the linguistic knowledge the system will use, how it will use it, and your hypotheses about how the linguistic knowledge will benefit the application system. Also, specify how the system will acquire the linguistic knowledge: will manual annotations be given as input? If so, which ones? If it will acquire the knowledge automatically, please specify how.
• Project Option 4: Specify as clearly as you can exactly what type of thing you plan to annotate. You must have clear, declarative, specific statements of what you will annotate. Identify the corpus you will annotate. Specify how much data you plan to annotate, and what work, if any, will be involved in preparing the corpus for annotation. Give a few examples of annotations of real naturally occuring sentences from the corpus. You won't be sure of your categories yet, so just use your current, initial ideas. It's fine (and expected) if your categories and definitions change between the proposal and final draft. Identify the tool you will use for annotation. Will you use an annotation system like Gate? Configure a tool using a speech processing system such as Waversurfer? Or, a formal, text-based representation that your evaluation code will access using regular expressions?