The project’s main purpose is to put you in a position to make judgements about the difficulty and feasibility of applications of language technology (learning outcome 4). A secondary goal is to allow you to deepen and apply the knowledge you have acquired in the course.

Slides: Introduction to the project

General structure

The project should be carried out in groups of approximately 6 students. The minimal project looks as follows:

• Choose an application of language technology (example: question answering)
• Choose a concrete system that implements the chosen application (example: mini_qa)
• Evaluate the chosen system with respect to relevant properties (example: correctness, efficiency)
• Draw conclusions about the difficulty and feasibility of the chosen application

More advanced projects will typically involve more elaborate evaluations (system comparisons or user studies) and/or own system development. However, recall that the project purpose is to let you assess the difficulty and feasibility of language technology applications, not merely a specific system.

When you choose to do system development as part of your project, consider using libraries such as scikit-learn and spaCy rather than coding your own solutions from scratch. Again, the project purpose is to provide you with a vehicle for assessing the difficulty and feasibility of language technology.

Choice of topic

You can freely choose both the application area and the specific system that you want to investigate. To get some inspiration for the choice of your project topic, you can have a look at the abstracts of previous projects (partly in Swedish).

Time requirements

The project runs for the full course, but most work is concentrated during the project weeks (W9–W10). When you plan your time for the project, you should calculate approximately 53 hrs per group member, i.e., 318 hrs for a group with 6 members. Here is a suggested breakdown of this time into concrete tasks:

• 10 hours for project preparations (roughly 2 hours per week)
• 32 hours for the most intensive part of the work during the project week
• 2 hours to participate in the project presentations
• 8 hours for the post-project paper (D6)

Deliverables

While the choice of project topic is entirely up to your group, the form of the project implementation is relatively rigid. In particular, throughout the project, you will have to make six deliverables (D1–D6), which are designed to keep you on track and give you feedback on your progress. The rest of this page contains detailed information about these deliverables.

During W3–W4, you will form your project group. We encourage you to form groups that include students with different backgrounds, skills, and interests, as this can improve the quality of the project. In particular, consider inviting IP students to your group.

After formation, your group is required to make a group contract that will govern your collaboration. The contract should spell out the behaviours that you expect of all group members, and procedures for resolving impasses in the group. Specific questions to think about include:

• How will we communicate with each other? At what times?
• How often and where will we meet?
• How will we make sure that our meetings are productive?
• What will we do if somebody does not show up at a meeting?
• What will we do if somebody breaks any rule set out in this contract?

Instructions: Make a group contract and have it signed by all members of the group. Include both the name and the LiU-ID of each group member. Scan the signed contract and submit it as a PDF document. Rules for hand-in assignments

Due date: 2023-01-27

Upon receiving your group contract, we will assign your group a group ID that you should use in future submissions (see below).

During the first four weeks of the project (W3–W6), your group should meet at least once a week to plan the project. At the end of this phase, your group is required to hand in a project plan that should answer the following questions:

• Which application of language technology do we want to investigate?
• Which specific system do we want to evaluate?
• How will we interact with the system? (For example, is there a web interface, or do we have to run a program?)
• How will we evaluate the system? (What are our evaluation criteria and our evaluation method?)
• How much system development will we need to do?
• How much annotation work (production of data) will we need to do?
• How will our project serve its purpose? (Make a connection to the learning objective.)
• Who will be responsible for what in the project?

Instructions: Write a project plan answering the above questions and submit it as a PDF document named as follows: LT-2023-D2-your group ID.pdf

Due date: 2023-02-10

Feedback: You will get feedback on your project plan from the examiner. You can use this feedback to understand to what degree your planned project meets the Assessment criteria for project complexity and presentation.

At the end of the project weeks (W9–W10), your group is required to submit a title and a short abstract for your project. The abstract should summarize what you have done in the project and your main results. The purpose of the abstract is to announce your presentation ahead of the ‘mini-conference’. To get some inspiration, you can have a look at the abstracts of previous projects.

Instructions: Come up with a title and prepare a short abstract for your project (one paragraph, max. 200 words). Please submit this information via this online form.

Due date: 2023-03-10

In the week following the project weeks (W11), your group will present your project at the course’s ‘mini-conference’. You are allotted a 15-minute time slot for this presentation, plus 5 minutes for feedback (see below). You are free to choose the presentation’s content and structure, but you should remember that the presentation needs to be understandable to everybody in the course.

In preparing the presentation, you may want to consider the following questions:

• What have you done in this project? Which application, which system did you choose?
• Why have you chosen this particular project?
• How does the system that you studied work?
• How have you evaluated the system?
• What are your conclusions regarding the difficulty and the feasibility of the application?

Instructions: Present your project, following the instructions above. The language of the presentation is English.

Schedule for the mini-conference. The mini-conference will take place on two different days during W11. You only need to attend the session at which your group is presenting (and giving peer feedback).

Session 1: Tuesday 14 March, 10:15–12:15

• 10:15–10:35 Group 01 (peer feedback: Group 09)
• 10:35–10:55 Group 03 (peer feedback: Group 11)
• 10:55–11:15 Group 05 (peer feedback: Group 01)
• 11:15–11:35 Group 07 (peer feedback: Group 03)
• 11:35–11:55 Group 09 (peer feedback: Group 05)
• 11:55–12:15 Group 11 (peer feedback: Group 07)

Session 2: Wednesday 15 March, 13:15–15:00

• 13:15–13:35 Group 02 (peer feedback: Group 06)
• 13:35–13:55 Group 04 (peer feedback: Group 08)
• 13:55–14:15 Group 06 (peer feedback: Group 10)
• 14:15–14:35 Group 08 (peer feedback: Group 02)
• 14:35–14:55 Group 10 (peer feedback: Group 04)

Feedback and examination: The examiner will assess your presentation according to the criteria spelt out in the Assessment criteria for project complexity and presentation. This assessment will contribute to your grade for the project module. The feedback will also be useful to you when preparing your post-project paper (D6).

In addition to giving a presentation yourself, your group will provide oral feedback on another group’s presentation. Your feedback should clarify which aspects of the presentation you found most interesting and which parts you believe can be improved. For the feedback to be holistic, each member of your group should be in charge of a specific task:

1. Summarize the presented project in at most three sentences.
2. Presentation of the application and the system: Which parts were clear? Which parts could be made even more clear?
3. Presentation of the evaluation: Which results were most interesting? Which other aspects could be evaluated?
4. Presentation technique: What worked well? What could be improved?
5. Based on the presentation, draw your own conclusion regarding the difficulty and feasibility of the chosen application.

Instructions: Distribute the tasks among the group members and give feedback according to the task descriptions at the mini-conference. All feedback should be constructive.

The final project-related assignment is an individual reflection paper. The purpose of this assignment is to allow you to take stock of what you have learned from the project. We ask you to structure your paper into three parts as follows:

• Describe your work with the project. Focus on things that let you illustrate what you have learned.
• Examine your work and link it to the relevant course content.
• Articulate your learning. What did you learn? How, exactly, did you learn it? Why does this learning matter?

You will encounter the same type of questions in the labs, which should give you a good starting point. For more tips on how to write a good reflection paper, see the Guidelines for the post-project paper.

In addition to the paper itself, we ask you to also submit a self-assessment form. The information in this form will allow us to provide more relevant feedback, by focusing on aspects where our own assessment deviates from yours. The form also provides you with an opportunity to vet your paper against the assessment criteria.

Instructions: Write a paper according to the given specification. The paper length should be around 1,500 words (approximately 3 pages). Submit your paper as a PDF document named as follows: LT-2023-D6-your LiU-ID.pdf. Please also submit the self-assessment form.

Due date: 2023-03-25

Examination: The examiner will assess your paper according to the criteria spelt out in the Guidelines for the post-project paper. This assessment will contribute to your grade for the project module.