Final Term Project

Computational Methods in Linguistics (Bender/Wassink)

Overview

The final project for this course will ideally be integrated into larger research endeavors that students are already engaged in. Students are expected to reflect on how their current research questions can be addressed with computational methods and linguistic databases. We will include time in class discussions for brainstorming about term project topics, resources, and methodologies.

Given the short time frame, we expect these projects to involve the exploitation of existing resources rather than collection, curation and/or annotation.

Write up

Final projects should be written up in short (~10 page) papers, which include the following sections:

• Abstract: An abstract describing the research, written in the format required by the LSA
• Hypothesis: What is the question being investigated, and how does it connect to broader research concerns? This section is expected to include at least some references to the linguistics literature.
• Resources: Which linguistic databases are brought to bear? Describe the databases in detail (data source, size, type of annotations).
• Methodology: How are the linguistic databases brought to bear on the research question? Describe your methodology in enough detail that another student in the class could reproduce it.
• Results: Describe what you found in your study.
• Implications: How do your results respond to the research question posed?
• Future work: What are the next steps you would (or will) take with this research? Describe what kind of further linguistic databases would be required, what different methodology you would try and how these next steps relate to the broader research questions.

Also to turn in

In addition to the written report, you will be expected to turn in any scripts, results files, etc. that you created in the process of doing the project.

Interim project report

We have an interim deadline of May 2nd to turn in an interim project report. That interim report should include draft versions of the Hypothesis, Resources, Methodology, and Results sections described above as well as a Discussion section in which you describe any issues or difficulties you are currently facing.

Schedule