Your final paper is due Thursday, June 9 at 11PM.

Goals

The main goal of this course is to carry out a novel analysis research project in small groups. The final paper will summarize your findings in the format of a conference paper. It could well serve as the launching point for submission to an NLP conference. The final presentations will have the same format as a conference talk, and so will be good practice for that.

Paper Format

Your paper should be between 4 and 8 pages, not including references. You may also include appendices with additional details. But your paper should not depend on the appendices, but must be self-contained.

Many NLP conferences accept short submissions of 4 pages, and long submissions of 8 pages. Those are good target lengths to aim for, but you can do any length in between as well.

Note: longer does not mean better! Aim to write as succinctly as your methods and results require. While writing, think about what role each section, then each paragraph, and finally each sentence are playing in the context of the larger research story that you are telling in your paper.

Your paper should have roughly the following structure:

  1. Abstract
  2. Introduction: motivate your question, situate it, and summarize your main findings and contributions
  3. Related Work: quickly summarize papers that are similar to yours, highlighting how they motivate your approach and how you are different
  4. Methods: how are you addressing your research question (models, data, etc)
  5. Results: summarize your main findings
  6. Discussion: what do we learn, what are some limitations
  7. Conclusion: summarize main finding of the paper, mention future work/extensions

For more details about these sections and writing an NLP paper in general, see these slides from week 5 and the pointers therein.

Submission

Your group only needs to submit one copy of the final paper. It must be uploaded in PDF format. Designate one person from the group to upload the paper on Canvas.

If you are not the designated person, you must, on Canvas, upload a file readme.pdf, containing:

  • your group number, as reflected in the spreadsheet
  • the name of the student who uploaded your paper