Paper/project plan

Due 5/5, in class or by email before class

This document is a proposal for what you plan to do for your term paper or term project. It should be a page long, and address the following:

1. What research question are you asking?
2. How does that question relate to the course topic?
3. What methods will you use to answer your question?
4. Which (min 2-3) of the course assigned readings do you plan to include as background?
5. Which other references do you plan to include (min 3)?

The purpose of this document is a) to get you thinking about your term paper/project relatively early in the quarter and b) to give me a chance to give you feedback relatively early in the process. If you would like to turn this document in earlier, I will do my best to get you feedback earlier.

General ideas for term papers/projects:

1. Typological study of some linguistic feature, in a small-medium but well-sampled set of languages. Define the feature, and it explore its realization across languages, using an approximation of the autotypologizing method.
2. Study of the compling literature on some task/evaluation metric/technique that is meant to be crosslinguistically valid and has been applied to multiple languages. What assumptions does the task/metric/technique make about language? What kinds of linguistic variations contradict those assumptions, and how common are they? How does the task/metric/technique perform across the languages it's been used with, and how might the typological properties of those languages explain the variation? How might the task/metric/technique be generalized to accommodate crosslinguistic variation better?
3. Typological study of some linguistic properties through the use of multilingual computational resources such as panlex.