University of Washington: Linguistics: LING 575: Spring 2011: Course Mechanics

LING 575 - Discourse and Dialogue
Spring 2011
Course Mechanics

Working in Teams

You may work in teams of two if you wish. Please try to distribute the work as evenly and equitably as possible. If you are unable to resolve a problem with your teammates, please let me know.

Class Participation

Please make every effort to attend class, either on-campus or on-line. Participation in class presentations and discussions is an important part of the course and will contribute to your overall class grade. If you miss more than 2 class meetings without an excused absence or prior arrangement, it will have a negative impact on your grade.

Homework, Paper and Project Requirements

Each student will lead the discussion of an article once or twice during the semester. Leading the dicussion means
* presenting a summary of 1-3 articles on a particular topic. The summary should indicate and explicate the important parts of the articles, the problems with the theory espoused or system explained, and the relevance for previous research discussed in class;
The final project should explore a specific problem area in discourse or dialogue processing. It must go beyond a simple review of the literature to suggest new solutions or extensions to existing approaches for the problem studied. The project may either be an analytical paper 10-15 pages in length OR may include an implementation of the proposed solution, accompanied by a 5-8 page description of the technique, the phenomena it handles, and how it extends existing capabilities.
Students seeking Linguistics elective credit for the course must complete an analytic paper.
Students will come up with the idea for their final project by the 3rd week of the term and will turn in a proposal at that time. Interim reports will be required periodically through the course. Final project presentations will take place during the last classes.

Deadlines and Late Work

Keeping to deadlines is a key part of project development. Late assignments will be scored, but will lose 5% for each 24 period after the due date, computed incrementally.
Incompletes can only be requested if all work has been successfully completed up to 2 weeks before the end of the term. For additional detail, please see the University's policy page.

Academic Misconduct

Copying code from the web or from classmates is plagiarism. Using other people's code for the main algorithm in an assignment will consistute cheating. For additional detail, please see the University's policy page. Use of a software library to complete a subcomponent of a programming assignment is acceptable- and will almost certainly be necessary - but must be identified and credited in comments in the code and other documentation. If you are unsure of whether a program performs too much of the required work, please ask for clarification.