Course Project

By February 28, you should have met with me and handed in a project proposal. Please both bring a hardcopy to class, and submit it electronically using the Digital Dropbox feature of Blackboard. By March 28, you should have met with me again and handed in a status report on your project. A draft of your report or paper is due April 18. The final report is due April 27. All of these deadlines must be met to receive credit on the course project. Students will give project presentations during the final days of class.

Feel free to discuss your ideas for projects before writing your proposal. Your project should be non-trivial and interesting, yet feasible given the time frame.

There are five options for the project:

A spoken dialogue corpus annotation project. This type of project must be done in pairs. It will involve developing annotation instructions, gathering or using a corpus, performing a training round of annotation, discussing the results with each other, revising the annotation instructions, and then annotating a fresh test set. Inter-coder reliability should be reported (percentage agreement and Kappa). The amount of data annotated need not be large.

Implement and evaluate an algorithm that performs some type of affective processing (such as recognizing or synthesizing affect, etc.) This type of project may be done in pairs or individually (or, if the project can support it, in larger groups than two).

Use affective knowledge to enhance an application system such as an implemented or wizard dialogue system. Processing may be fully automatic, or your system may take manual annotations as input. This type of project may be done in pairs or individually (or, if the project can support it, in larger groups than two).

Read 15 or more papers on a topic and write a paper about them. The goal is not to reiterate everything in the papers, but rather to address a specific set of issues and points of comparison between the papers. These should be specified in your project proposal. Your paper should be at least 15 pages long, single spaced. It should be well written, clear, and interesting, and should accomplish the goals laid out in the proposal for the project. This type of project must be done individually.

Write an NSF-style research proposal, though the bibliography need not be as extensive as in an actual submitted proposal. A sample proposal will be made available to students choosing this option. Note that you must hand in a proposal for your proposal, just as for the other course project options. This type of project may be done in pairs or individually.