Project
For the project work, you will choose a NLP-related problem and attempt to solve it. The projects are done in groups of up to three people but can also be done individually. Selection of the project group as well as the report submission are in Moodle.
How to choose a project topic?
There are various options for that.
- It can be a problem that is of interest to you.
- It can be a replication or improvement of an existing paper.
- It can be based on a Kaggle competition (or some other benchmark data).
If you have a problem with choosing a topic, you can consult the teachers and we can help you to find a topic of interest.
Keep in mind that this is a relatively small project, expected to be executed in max half a semester and thus, it is extremely important that the data would be available or easily obtained. The project can also center on collecting and annotating some new data, with less emphasis on experimental work.
The criteria of a successful project
It is hard to give exact criteria of what constitutes a successful project. In a very broad sense, the criteria are:
- The project topic should be related to NLP (although occasionally students have successfully worked also on projects related to another study area using the methods of NLP).
- The project should have a reasonable goal that can be stated as a hypothesis, research question or simply a goal.
- For achieving the stated goals, the project should implement appropriate methods. These methods can vary widely depending on the project goal, but in most projects the method involves training some model on a dataset and evaluating this model on the test set. Choosing appropriate methods for your problem is an important skill that this project task is designed to allow you to practice.
- The project should assess somehow whether the goal was achieved or not. Typically this means using some quantitive evaluation measures to evaluate results. For some project topics, using quantitative evaluation measures is not so feasible, so these projects need to consider other ways of evaluation (human evaluation, qualitative error analysis). It is highly encouraged to do some qualitative error analysis in every project.
Project assessment
The project gives a maximum of 35 points in total. The project assessment includes three activities/deliverables:
- Presenting the project method in the seminar on 24.04.2024 or 26.04.2024 (instructions in Moodle).
- Presenting the project results in the seminar on 22.05.2024 or 24.05.2024.
- Submitting the final project report (due date after the final project seminars, to be agreed).
The seminar presentation will not give points per se, but not presenting your project in seminar will deduct 5 points per seminar. That means, if your group does not present your project in either seminar, you can still get max 25 points just based on your project final report.
However, we highly enourage attending and presenting on both seminars, because:
- in the method seminar we can make sure that your project is methodologically on track and guide you, if necessary.
- in the project results seminar, it will be interesting for other to see what you have accomplished and it will be interesting for you to see what others have done.
- Additionally, you can get some useful feedback you will still have time to incorporate in the final project report.
Project presentation
The allocated time for each project presentation is 7 minutes + 3 minutes for questions.
The presentation should convey the following information:
- Project title and group members.
- Little bit of background and motivation.
- Problem formulation: the stated goal or hypothesis or research question.
- The overall methodological approach.
- The main results (if you have them) or the preliminary results (if not all the work has been done yet).
- Conclusions based on the results.
- Contributions of the group members so far.
Final report
The instructions and the submission of the project final report are in Moodle. The due date is 09.06.2024.
If you are finishing your studies this Spring and need your grade earlier, please submit your final report by 26.05.2024 at 23:59. This will give us enough time to grade the project on time.