On a title page, your proposal should include a title, state which of the five types of projects you will do and identify your partners, if any.

The body of your proposal should describe what you plan to do.

It should include citations and a bibliography of relevant literature you will read. These should include at least one meaningful citation to a paper or article from the assigned class readings to ensure that you work on something related to the course.

If there is more than one team member, your proposal should state what each person will do. Note that for the options involving system development (the 2nd and 3rd options), I am willing to consider proposals from teams larger than two, if the project can support it. This is a change to the syllabus effective 1/13/05.

Your proposal should also discuss any related work you are doing for another class or research project, and contrast that work with what you plan to do for your course project. It is fine to do something related to an existing project, but your course project may not be work or results you (or a partner) are already performing for another class or research project. For example, if you are already performing an annotation study, you could propose to develop an annotation scheme for related discourse or pragmatic information, and add your new types of annotations to your existing data. Or, if you are already working on an NLP system, you could propose to augment it with discourse or pragmatic processing that you did not already plan to add this semester.

Your proposal should describe the resources (data, systems, knowledge resources, etc.) you will use and your plans for acquiring or creating them.

It should describe your goals, methodology, and plans for evaluation, as appropriate for the type of project.

Below are specific comments about each type of project which are in addition to the specifications above.

Description from the syllabus: A corpus annotation project. This type of project must be done in pairs. It will involve developing annotation instructions, gathering 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.

Proposal comments: Specify as clearly as you can exactly what type of thing you plan to annotate. You must have clear, declarative, specific statements of what you will annotate. If you can't do this, you won't be able to come up with an annotation scheme that works. Trust me!

Identify the corpus you will annotate. Specify how much data you plan to annotate, and what work, if any, will be involved in preparing the corpus for annotation.

Give a few examples of annotations of real naturally occuring sentences from the corpus. You won't be sure of your categories yet, so just use your current, initial ideas. It's fine (and expected) if your categories and definitions change between the proposal and final draft.

Identify the tool you will use for annotation. Will you use an annotation system like Gate? Or, a formal, text-based representation that your evaluation code will access using regular expressions?

Give a schedule for the project milestones (e.g., initial annotation scheme, first training round, ...). See the end of the notes for Days 2-3 on the course schedule for a description of what goes into an annotation project.

Description from the syllabus: Implement and evaluate an algorithm that performs some type of discourse or pragmatic processing (such as anaphora resolution, recognizing discourse relations, discourse segmentation, resolving bridging inferences, tracking a temporal reference frame, etc.) This type of project may be done in pairs or individually (or, if the project can support it, in larger groups than two).

Proposal comments: Specify the input and output of the system. Also, specify the type of strategy your system will use to perform its task, and the types of knowledge your system will use to perform it.

If you are implementing an existing algorithm, such as Lappin and Leass's pronoun-resolution algorithm, include comments about which aspects you may focus on more than others, or other ways you may modify the algorithm or its use.

If you are running new experiments, please state your hypothesis or hypotheses about what your experiments will show.

Description from the syllabus: Use discourse or pragmatic knowledge to improve an application system such as a question answering 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).

Proposal comments: Specify the application system, the discourse or pragmatic knowledge the system will use, how it will use it, and your hypotheses about how the discourse or pragmatic knowledge will benefit the application system. Also, specify how the system will acquire the discourse knowldge: will manual annotations be given as input? If so, which ones? If it will acquire the knowledge automatically, please specify how.

Description from the syllabus: 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.

Proposal comments: Your proposal should describe the topic and its relevance to the class. It should give the bibliography of papers you will read, and discuss why you chose these papers. The proposal should state and motivate the set of specific issues and points of comparison that your paper will focus on. Why are you reading these papers? What interesting questions will you ask about them? Why are you doing this -- of what value will the paper be?

Description from the syllabus: 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.

Proposal comments: Your proposal should lay out your plans for developing the proposal. What literature will you consider? What are your current ideas about what you will propose?

Your proposal proposal should be somewhere between an outline and a draft of your proposal. Show the sections you plan to include, and what you plan to do in each section. Before you start, you should have some ideas about research hypotheses, motivations, approach, and evaluation plans. These should be sketched in your proposal proposal.