Overall Guidelines

The midway presentation and report are designed to help you:

  • Continue developing your course project/paper and make concrete progress toward the final submission.
  • Receive early feedback from your classmates and the instructor.
  • Identify methodological questions or decisions that would benefit from discussion.

Note. I am providing these preliminary guidelines in advance to help you plan your work. Some details may be updated as we get closer to the date.

Midway Presentation

During Week 10 (October 28), we will not have a regular lecture or tutorial. Instead, you will participate in a small-group presentation. Each student will briefly present their individual project to the group. For each student, approximately 15 minutes will be allocated:

  • 10 minutes: Project presentation (with your laptop)
  • 5 minutes: Questions, feedback, and discussion

The goal of this session is not to give a polished conference-style presentation, but to clearly explain your current project and receive useful feedback from your classmates. During the discussion, group members should actively ask questions and provide constructive feedback!

What to Cover in the Presentation

  • Research problem and motivation
    • What problem or topic does your project address?
    • Why is it worth investigating?
  • Research question(s)
    • What specific question(s) are you trying to answer?
  • Relevant background
    • Introduce the key previous research needed to understand your project.
    • Literature that informs your research questions and/or methodology.
  • Data and methodology
    • Corpus you use
    • Your unit of analysis
    • Linguistic or computational measures
    • NLP or corpus-analysis methods
  • Current progress
    • Explain what you have completed so far and what remains to be done.
    • Specific results are NOT required at this stage, but you are welcome to present preliminary results if you have them.
  • Questions or challenges
    • You may highlight methodological questions, uncertainties, or challenges for which you would particularly like feedback.

Participation during Presentations

While listening to the presentations, you will be asked to complete and submit a short feedback form. The purpose of the form is to help you stay engaged and provide constructive feedback to your classmates. Participation in the presentation session contributes to the presentation/participation component of your course grade (4%), so the submitted form will be used for grading.

Submission

Please upload your presentation slides to MyCourses before the class!.

Evaluation (5 points)

Your presentation will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

  1. Research Focus and Progress (2 points) — Is the research problem clearly defined, and does the presentation show meaningful progress since the project proposal?
  2. Development of Research Design (2 points) — Are the data, unit of analysis, measures, and planned methods sufficiently developed at this stage of the project?
  3. Current Challenges and Next Steps (1 point) — Does the presentation identify remaining questions, challenges, or decisions and provide a clear plan for moving the project forward?

Midway Report

The midway report is a partial draft of your final paper. For the midway report, please focus on the first three major sections:

  1. Introduction This does not need to be fully polished or complete at this stage, but it should provide enough information for me to understand your research motivation, problem, and research question(s). Some of you may already have much of this material from your project proposal.

  2. Background / Related Work This can be an expanded version of the annotated bibliography you submitted with your proposal.

  3. Methodology This can be an expanded version of the Unit of Analysis and Measures section from your proposal. Please provide more detail about your data, unit(s) of analysis, measures, coding procedures, and/or computational methods, as relevant to your project.

  4. (optional) You may also include a short section at the end listing questions, unresolved methodological issues, or areas where you would like feedback.

The following sections are expected for the final paper: Results, Discussion, Conclusion.

Possible format 1

A standard DOCX format. If you choose this option, please use 12-point Times New Roman, double spacing, and keep the paper to no more than 10 pages, excluding references.

Possible format 2

  • ACL-style paper. The ACL format is provided as a useful model for organizing a computational linguistics research paper.
  • Length: Approximately 4 pages for a short paper or 8 pages for a long paper, excluding references. So if you want to keep things concise, 4 pages is fine with me.
  • File type: DOCX or PDF.
  • Template: