The course is lecture-based with a midterm examination and a final course project. There are also regular assignments, which often involve implementation of an algorithm and/or experimentation with real text data.
Attendance is mandatory, but use common sense if you are sick or run into any emergency situation.
In case you cannot go to a class, you must send (or ask some one to send) an explanation message to the instructor
within 24 hours of the class. For example, if you cannot go to a class on Wednesday, you need to send a
message before 2:00pm the next day (i.e., Thursday). Note that attending the lectures is often the only chance for you to learn
certain materials as you may not find them in any textbook or other readings.
The assignments are designed to ensure that students have a deep and precise understanding of the major algorithms, thus the students are required to complete them independently. However, discussion with others is allowed to the extent of helping understand the material. The course newsgroup may be a good place for discussions. The purpose of student collaboration is to facilitate learning, not to circumvent it. The actual solution must be done by each student alone, and the student should be ready to reproduce their solution upon request. If any substantial discussion happens, every one involved must write down the names of the people that he/she has discussed with and the nature or topic of discussion. In any case, you must exercise academic integrity. See the University Policy on Academic Integrity, especially the section on plagiarism.
Late submission of an assignment would result in a reduced grade for the assignment, unless
an extension has been granted by the instructor. An assignment is worth full credit at the beginning of
class on the due date (later if an extension has been granted). It is worth at most 90% credit for
the next 24 hours. It is worth at most 50% credit for the following 24 hours.
It is worth 25% credit after that. If you need an
extension, please ask for it (by sending email to the instructor) as soon as the need for it is
known. Extensions that are requested promptly will be granted more liberally. You must
turn in all assignments.
There is a difference between asking questions about the course content and asking questions about homework:
So if you don't understand a concept/method talked about in the class, you should ask us questions or try to discuss the problem with others, unless you would really like to see if you could figure out by yourself, which of course, is also beneficial to you.
However, you must complete your homework independently in any case; this is so that we can be sure that you really benefit from doing the homework and that homework grading is fair.
So, in any case, you should not ask TA/me or any other students to explain how to solve a problem so that you can skip the process of problem solving.
In case if you are really stuck with some homework problem and don't really know how to proceed, you should let us know and we'll be able to help you proceed. You may also discuss with your classmates to get some help in such a case, but if you have received substantial help from any other student(s) for finishing your homework, you must briefly describe what kind of help you have received from others. Note that both the person who provided help and the person who received help should report this collaboration. It could be as simple as:
* XXX explained to me how to do YYY step in problem 2. and * I explained how to do XXX for problem 2 to XXX.
The purpose of the course project is twofold: (1) to give the students opportunities to
apply what has been learned to solve some real world text information management problems;
(2)to allow the students to learn techniques for text information management by working
on a real problem. Team work is allowed and encouraged. There will be a number of "instructor-designed" project topics
available for you to choose, but you are also very welcome, indeed encouraged, to come up with any
interesting topic on your own. You will be asked to do a poster presentation of your course work and submit
a 4-6 pages written project report at the end of the semester. See Project Page for details.
Graduate students who take the course for 4 credit hours are required to finish
a literature review on a course-related topic using the class wiki space.
The topic will be selected by the student
with approval of the instructor. Often the selected topic would be related to
the course project that the student is involved in. Since the project proposal is due March 26, you should plan to finalize the topic for your literature review around that time. The literature review is due
May 7, 2008, Wednesday, 11:59pm.
Grading will be based on the following weighting scheme.