CS 8761 Fall 2002

Here are some comments regarding assignment 1. These are all
relating to submission procedures, etc. It is very important
that you follow the requirements for these assignments. I was
generally surprised at how often simple directions appear to
have been ignored. 

As I mentioned earlier, I was dismayed at how poorly some of your
code reacted to very simple testing. This is a sign that you did not 
test your code before you submitted it. In future I will expect 
your code to run without any such fixing on my part, and I will 
expect it to run exactly as I have specified. 

I was also disappointed at how hard it was for me to find your data.
I had asked for this in specific directories, and several of you
did this your own way and did not even bother to fix it after I 
pointed it out the first time. If I ask you to put data in a directory
with a particular naming convention, please do so.

Relating to your data, in most of your reports you did not tell me
what data you were using. Please do this, and be specific. Give me
file names from Project Gutenberg, URLs for web data, etc. 

Put your name on all files you submit, and submit only those
that are requested. This is basic. Please make sure you do this.
I am amazed that I even have to mention this. 

Comment your source code. Again, I am amazed that I have to 
point this out. 

With respect to these comments, if you take a technique from a 
published source or a web page (a little routine from the Perl 
Cookbook or a newsgroup, for example) please make sure you mention 
this in the comments.

Finally, I was a little disappointed in some of your experiments, 
especially for your second language. Some of you seemed to make very
half-hearted efforts to find data and/or run experiments. In some 
cases you only ran with a few sentences, and you did so from very small  
amounts of data where it seems inevitable that you had to know what 
those sentences were. 

I will have some "technical" comments in a followup note. However, I
want these procedural issues to be clear. Please follow all of the
assignment requirements carefully. If you do not and you submit 
programs and supporting materials (reports, data, etc.) that do not 
follow my specifications then you should assume the worst with
respect to the grade you will get. 

Thanks,

Ted Pedersen
October 6, 2002