Term Project Specs

Note Projects may be done as individual work or in pairs, but even if they are done in pairs, the term papers should be written individually.

Software/experiment

  1. Choose a shared task, from this list or another that meets the requirements.
  2. Parse the training (and eventually test data) with the relevant DELPH-IN grammar.
  3. Extract features from the MRS repesentations returned by the grammar.
  4. Incorporate those features into an existing system (or, though this is not encouraged, create your own system that uses them).
  5. Use train/dev data *only* to test the system as you are debugging it.
  6. Compare the performance of the system with and without the MRS-based features over the test data, using the standard metrics (and ideally, evaluation script) of the shared task.

Paper

Term papers should be written according to the ACL style files, with 6-8 pages of text (exclusive of the bibliography) and include the following sections:

  1. Abstract: State the task approached, the main innovation and main result.
  2. Introduction: Briefly overview the task you are approaching, explain what is innovative (likely the application of MRS and the inclusion of MRS-based features, possibly the ML algorithm), summarize the main result, and give an overview of the paper.
  3. Background/Related work: Describe the task more fully; explain the previous state of the art with a special focus on the ML features used and how they differ from what you are doing;
  4. Methodology: Describe your methodology, i.e., getting the MRS structures, design of MRS-based features, how the MRS-based features were incorporated, what you did in case no analysis was returned by the grammar
  5. Evaluation: Test data, evaluation metrics, results; preferably you can test with and without the MRS-based features.
  6. Discussion/Error analysis: What is the effect of adding the MRS-based features? What does error analysis suggests about the strengths and weaknesses of the approach?
  7. Conclusion: Summarize the paper (task approached, main innovation, results) and point the way forward for future work.
  8. Acknowledgments: For term projects done in pairs, the acknowledgments section should indicate who the other partner was and how the tasks were divvied up.
  9. Bibliography

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Last modified: 1/2/14