On a title page, your proposal should include a title, state which of the four types of projects you will do and identify your partners, if any.
The body of your proposal should describe what you plan to do.
It should include citations and a bibliography of relevant literature you will read. These should include at least one meaningful citation to a paper or article from the assigned class readings to ensure that you work on something related to the course.
If there is more than one team member, your proposal should state what each person will do. Note that for the options involving system development, I am willing to consider proposals from teams larger than two, if the project can support it.
Your proposal should also 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.
Your proposal should describe the resources (data, systems, knowledge resources, etc.) you will use and your plans for acquiring or creating them.
It should describe your goals, methodology, and plans for evaluation, as appropriate for the type of project.
Finally, it should give a schedule for the project milestones.
Below are specific comments about each type of project which are in addition to the specifications above.
Proposal comments:
Proposal comments: 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.
Proposal comments: 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.
Proposal comments: 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?