Term Project Specs

Term projects for this class will take one of the following forms:

  1. Take an existing off the shelf system and run it over some new data set with demographic information included. Do a demographically-informed error analysis. Present the error analysis and a discussion of its ethical implications, both in terms of what will happen if the system is used unmodified and how the system could/should be improved.
  2. Take an existing NLP task and analyze it in terms of Value Sensitive Design. Assume that systems approaching the task will be deployed by companies and/or government agaencies and/or available for use by anyone as open source projects. Who are the stakeholders that should be consulted? What questions should the stakeholders be asked? If possible, find representative stakeholders from multiple categories and interview them. On the basis of these interviews (or your own analysis, if interviews aren't possible), write recommendations for improvements in the training data, task design, or task deployment. If you are working on an MS thesis, and you know what NLP task it will involve, it is strongly recommended that you take this option with your thesis task.
  3. Some other project that you propose.

Paper

In any case, present your results in a 6 to 8-page paper following the ACL format. Your paper should have the following sections:

Milestones

To help you with this term paper, there will be several milestones along the way:

  1. 10/29 Project proposal: If taking options (1) or (2), this can be a paragraph explaining the system and data set (1) or task (2) you are approaching. If taking option (3), I'm looking for a page explaining the project.
  2. 11/12 Paper outline: Fill in the sections above (or modify, if somethign there doesn't fit) with bullet points specific to your paper.
  3. 11/24 Paper draft
  4. 12/3 Comments on peer's paper draft
  5. 12/14 Final paper

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ebender at u dot washington dot edu
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