An advantage of the survey format of this course is that we get a broad, bird's eye view of the field of computational linguistics. We hope that this will allow you find things that excite you, and to get an intuition of the scale and difficulty of various tasks in computational linguistics.
Identify a personal topic of interest. This may be a long-term project you are planning for an honors thesis, a dream job, a draft of research statement for applications, etc.
A good response will include details about your motivation, a broad description of the topic, and what you currently know about the topic and know what to do. It will identify possible timelines for specific projects, if applicable, and discuss the resources that would be necessary to do work in this topic.
A great response will also touch on the research ethics of the topic. For example, can you easily incorporate the priciples of linguistic gratuity or similar?
You should be able to accomplish those points in about 2-3 pages (~500-750 words) of prose.