Ted Pedersen - CS 5761 - Introduction to Natural Language Processing

CS 5761 - Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Project Proposal due by 5pm Weds April 7 via webdrop. Please submit a pdf or ps file.

Objectives

To outline the design and scope of your project in a formal written proposal.

Specification

Your project will involve producing both a Perl implementation and a written report. There are two possible topics:

Conduct an analysis that shows whether or not the Voynich Manuscript consists of human language (or not).
Develop a method that uses information from Google to identify sets of related words (much like Google Sets).

Within these topics you have considerable discretion as to how you proceed. If you would like to work in teams of two, that is possible. However, you must clearly define what each team member will be contributing. You should structure things so that each team member has a distinct role in the project.

If you have an alternative idea for a project, please let me know via email by Weds March 31. I am willing to consider such possibilities, but would like to discuss those with you before you proceed too far. If you would like to use the basic idea of the projects above and modify them in some significant way, then you should also send me an email note by March 31 letting me know the general idea so we can discuss. By Weds April 7 you should have produced a project proposal. It should include the following:

Problem Description (1 page) : Which of these problems are you trying to solve? Describe the problem in general terms and what practical applications the techniques you are developing could have. You should provide at least two references to published papers (not just web sites) that discuss the same or a related problem. You should read and briefly summarize these papers. If you are working in a team of 2, you should each find and read 2 papers (for a total of 4).
Overview of Solution/Approach (1 page) : What is the general approach you plan on taking?
- Voynich Project: describe what tests or techniques your analysis will consist of, and why you think they will help to answer the question of if it is human language.
- Related Words: describe your algorithm as a series of steps. Provide an example that shows how it works.
If you are working in a team of two, clearly indicate which of you will handle which step. All steps in either project should be clearly assigned to one team member or the other.
Evaluation Plan (1-2 paragraphs) : How will you show that your solution is valid? Will you need to find or create "gold standard" data to use as a point of comparison? If so, where will you get that, or how will you create it.
- Voynich Project: You may want to consider carrying out your analysis on text that is known to be human language (or not) and showing that your analysis produces the correct result. Text that is truly human language is easy to find (Project Gutenberg, etc.) and you could possibly use your program from lab4 to generate text based on a unigram model, which might not look like true human language. (These are just ideas, you can proceed as you wish).
- Google Sets: You may want to consider comparing the sets of words produced with sets of words that are known to exist in a thesaurus or other resource. You may want to consider using WordNet, which provides sets of related words. This is installed on the csdev machines and freely available for download. Just run "wn" or "man wn" to find out more.

Your proposal should probably be 2-3 pages, and it should be well written and carefully thought out. It will provide a road map for your project so the more you put into this the more smoothly your project will go.

You will also present your project proposal in the lab on Thursday April 8. There is no need to prepare a formal presentation, we can use your written proposal as a point of reference while you describe things.

If I have significant concerns about your topic or some aspect of your proposal I will let you know within a few days after you submit the proposal. In that case I might request that you make some changes or provide additional details.