CS886 Projects and Presentations

Here is some more information on what is expected, and some ideas to get you started.

Presentations:: These should be done individually. You will read one or more papers and give a 45 minutes class presentation. When someone else give his/her presentation, you need to do three things: read the papers he's presenting, write reviews about the papers, finally give a grade on the presentation.
Projects:: These can be done individually or in groups of 2. A project might involve conducting an experiment or thinking about a theoretical problem, or trying to relate two problems. The end result should be a 5-10 page report, and if you wish, a 5-10 minute presentation.

Presentation Ideas

Choose a paper on the class webpage or the one related to statistical natural language processing

Project Ideas

Many of the above topics may also be good for projects. That is, read about the topic, think about it, and then

do an experiment, or
try to simplify the results, or
try to improve/extend the results in some way, see what happens if you modify the model, etc.

Then write up what you get (along with a coherent descripition of necessary background information). For example,

You could experiment with Hofmann's PLSA, then combine it with uni-gram or bigram language model for information retrieval or speech recognition tasks.
Read two papers coming from different communities that seem related and try to relate them.
Or come up with your own idea. Make up your own problem and work on it.

It may be that you read a paper, try improving it, and aren't able to make progress. In that case, it's OK to fall back on just explaining the paper as clearly as you can, in your own words.