Project Milestone 5: Final Submission

For your final project you should prepare a 10 minute video presentation for the class and a report documenting what you accomplished.

Video Presentation

For this semester we are requiring all presentations to be in pre-recorded video form – this will allow us to move through presentations quickly while simultaneously leaving you with a nice artifact that you can show off to friends/colleagues/future employers. We will be enforcing a strict time limit of 10 minutes for the video submission so please do not exceed that. To that end, please feel free to use editing software such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker to edit down and refine your video presentation. Chris’s general rule-of-thumb is about 1 minute per slide, so you should aim to have no more than 10 or so content slides. As long as you stay within the time limit, you are welcome to have multiple team-members trade off speaking in the presentation. Finally, if you have built an interactive experience, you should try to include a demo of it in your video presentation.

Presentation Grading

Your presentation will be graded on the following criteria.

1. Length: The presentation length does not exceed 10 minutes.
2. Motivation: The motivation for the project and how it relates to course material is clearly explained.
3. Communication: The method and final results are explained in a way the class can understand, without use of acronyms of terms we have not covered in class (unless you define them).
4. Results: The main findings of the project are reported.
5. Lessons Learned: What did you learn from this project and what might you do differently next time? What questions or directions for future work remain?

Project Final Report

Your final report is a document that describes what you have accomplished in your project this semester. You are very welcome and encouraged to draw content from all previous reports you have submitted so far. At this point in the class, all of you have read and presented on academic papers. You should use those journal and conference papers as inspiration for what a good writeup looks like. For additional inspiration, here’s an example of a final report from 2020.

For your final report, the use of LaTeX and a conference template is required. You may choose to use the template from ACL or the template from AAAI. Please directly message us if you’d like to use a LaTeX template from a different conference.

Report Sections

The report should have the following sections.

Title & Author Names: What are you calling your project? These are not graded but still important! (No section header for these bits)

1. Project Description: This is the “what” and the “why” of your project.
   • The “what”: Explain the main idea of your project and what you are trying to accomplish. It’s okay if these have changed since the project proposal.
   • The “why”: If it’s a research project, what’s your research question (i.e., what are you trying to prove with this work)? If it’s an artifact that you’re creating, why are you creating it?
2. Related work: What previous research will you be using or building off of? What work are you inspired by? Don’t just list previous work and summarize their contributions, rather, tell a short “story” using what you found out from the Literature Review. Explain how you fit into the broader context. This section can include papers from the course schedule as well as anything else you want to cite.
3. Methods: What are the steps you took to accomplish your project? This section should include enough detail that someone reading it could reasonably attempt to reproduce your work. Include figures if applicable.
4. Data: What datasets, if any, did you use? If you collected or built your own dataset, how did you go about doing this? What are some potential problems/challenges you encountered with the data? If you had to clean your data, what did you use to do that? Explain your pre-processing steps.
5. Evaluation: How are you evaluating your results? How do you know if you’ve answered your research question? If you’re creating an interactive experience, what do you use to determine that it’s working well?
   • These can be things like accuracy, diversity metrics, perplexity, BLEU/ROUGE scores, success rate, human evaluation scores, etc. depending on your project.
6. Results: Describe your main results as well as the results for intermediate steps that build toward your main project goal. Please include tables, plots, and example system outputs where applicable. Feel free to include negative results in this section as well.
7. Discussion: This is a meta section to discuss how the project went. What things did you try that didn’t work out? If you were to start over from scratch, what would you do differently? If someone were to continue working on this project, what do you suggest are good next steps/good future work?

Grading

This section is our grading rubric for the final report.

1. Formatting: All of the sections described in the previous section are present and clearly marked. The report includes a title of the project and the name of the authors at the top. Images, tables, and other figures have captions and are referenced in the text. The paper uses LaTeX and either the ACL template or the AAAI template. The paper makes use of citations that follow the standard convention of whatever conference the template is from.
2. Communication: Your report should be targeted at an audience who is familiar with NLP but has not taken the class and knows nothing about what you have done so far. You can imagine your audience as either the readers of a technical blog post (if you took the interactive experience option) or as reviwers of a paper submission to an NLP conference such as ACL (if you took the research question option). You should aim to make your methods section clear enough that others could attempt to reproduce your work and your results section clear enough that readers understand exactly what experiments you ran.
3. Style: You should write in paragraphs and complete sentences unless there is a very good reason not to.
4. Content: The report answers all relevant questions posed in the previous section. Images, tables, plots, of other figures are used to support the report contents.
5. Length: There is no strict word length requirement, but if your paper has fewer than 1,500 words (not including referneces) then it is very likely you have not provided enough detail.

What to Submit

• A link to your pre-recorded video presentation. This can be on any video hosting platform (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.). Please double check that the video link is visible to the public before submitting.

• report.pdf which contains your project report. The use of LaTeX and a conference template is required. You may choose to use the template from ACL or the template from AAAI. Please message us directly if you’d like to use a LaTeX template from a different conference.