CS410 Text Information Systems (Spring 2008)

Course Project

Introduction

The course project is to give the students hands-on experience on developing some novel text information management tools. The project thus emphasizes applied research and "deliverables", meaning that the outcome of your project should be something tangible, typically some kind of prototype system that can be demonstrated. Group work is strongly encouraged.

General steps

Grading criteria

Your project will be graded primarily based on the following weighting scheme:

The factors to be considered in grading include (1) the utility of the tool you develop; (2) the relevance to the course; (3) the challenges you have to solve (i.e., technical contributions); and (4) the quality of presentation/writing. Refer to the guidelines on the proposal and report for what should be included in a report.

1. Pick a topic

You can either pick from a list of sample topics (to be posted on the class wiki), or choose your own topic. Please keep in mind that the general goal is to develop some new tool to help people manage text information. Leveraging existing resources is especially encouraged.

When picking a topic, try to ask yourself the following questions:

What is exactly the function of the tool that you would like to develop?
Who will benefit from such a tool?
Does this kind of tools already exist? If similar tools exist, how is your tool different from them? Would people care about the difference?
Do you have some rough idea about how the target function might be achieved? (The instructor will help you answer this question.)
How do you plan to show people that the tool to be developed is indeed useful? (You could make a demo of its function and/or report some quantitative evaluation figures.)
What is the minimum goal to be achieved during this semester? (Try to drop everything non-essential and only keep the function that is truly novel.)

2. Form a team

You are encouraged to work with other students as a team. Teamwork not only gives your some experience on working with others, but also allows you to work on a larger (presumably more interesting) topic. Generally speaking, all the team members of a group will get the same grade provided all have contributed substantially to the project. In case there is evidence that a team member has only made superficial contribution to a project (I really hope this won't happen!), the particular team member's grade may be discounted. The project report must state clearly who did what.

3. Check related work

While choosing a topic, you should also check to see whether the tool/function you would like to develop already exists. If so, you may want to figure out where exactly your novelty is and whether novelty leads to any benefit for a user. Your goal is to extend , rather than duplicate, the existing work. The instructor can also help you check related work. Please feel free to discuss your plan with the instructor at any time.

4. Write a proposal

You are required to write a one-page proposal before you actually go in depth on a topic. Please post your proposal on the class wiki by March 26, 2008, Wednesday, 11:59pm. To post your proposal, go to the Project Proposals page, and add your project to the page. Follow the same format as used by some existing project proposals there. Specifically, you need to create a page for your project, where you would put your proposal. It is up to you how to design such a page; it could directly contain your proposal or have your proposal as an attachment. If you pick a project that is already listed in the Project Topics page , you only need to add a line like "# [Exact project title]" into the Project Proposals page, which should be automatically linked to the existing page. (Make sure that the title is exactly the same as shown in the project topics page.) If your project is not listed in the project topics page, you can also add a line like "# [Your project title]", which would create a page for your project. After saving it, you may click on the line to add content to your newly created page.

In the proposal, you should address the following questions and include the names and email addresses of all the team members. (As long as these questions are addressed, the proposal does not have to be very long. A couple of sentences for each question would be sufficient.)

What is the function of the tool?
Who will benefit from such a tool?
Does this kind of tools already exist? If similar tools exist, how is your tool different from them? Would people care about the difference?
What existing resources can you use?
What techniques/algorithms will you use to develop the tool? (Instructor will help you with this. It's fine if you just mention some vague idea.)
How will you demonstrate the usefulness of your tool.
A very rough timeline to show when you expect to finish what. (The timeline doesn't have to be accurate.)

5. Work on the project

You should reuse any existing tools as much as possible. For example, consider using the Lucene or Lemur toolkit if possible. There are also many tools available on the Internet. See the resources page for some useful pointers.

Discuss any problems or issues with your teammates or classmates. Discuss them with the TA and the instructor. If you need special support (e.g., more disk space on your account), please let the instructor know.

Consider documenting your work regularly. This way, you will already have a lot of things written down by the end of the semester.

6. Present the course project

At the end of the semester, each project team is expected to make a poster presentation in the classroom. The purpose of this presentation is: (1) Let you know about others' projects. (2) Give you some opportunity to practice presentation skills, which are very important for a successful career. (3) Obtain some feedback from others about your project.

There will be two sessions. In each session, one half of the project groups will present their projects and the other half will be the audience. So everyone should show up for both sessions. Please check the presentation schedule to see when you should present your project and when you should be the audience. There will be about 11 projects to be presented in each session, so you may not have enough time to see all of them (definitely not enough time for you to see each in detail). So you should check the presentation schedule (and read their proposals in the wiki if you can) to identify the most interesting ones to you so that you can prioritize the presentations to see. This is also what always happens in any top conference -- you will only be able to focus on a small number of talks/posters.

You are strongly encouraged to do a demo of your system if possible. If your system is not designed to run in real time (e.g., it may be an offline analysis tool), you should show some sample results. In general, your slides/presentation should roughly follow your project proposal. So please touch all the following aspects:

What is the function of your system?
Why is this function useful?
Is this function already supported in any way by the current systems/tools (e.g., Google)? How novel is your project?
How did you implement this function?
How well does your system work? (Show some sample results -- quantitative evaluation, screen shots,etc)
Any ideas for further improvement?

Please prepare about 12 PowerPoint slides and print them out to post on the wall. There will be a tape for you to use to attach the slides on the wall, so you don't need to prepare it.

Your presentation will be graded mainly based on the clarity of your slides and whether your slides have covered all the questions listed above. Think about how you can best present your work so as to make it as easy as possible for your audience to understand your main messages.

7. Write a project report (due May. 7, 2007, Wed, 11:59pm)

You should write your report as if you were writing a short conference paper. You should address the same questions as those you have addressed in the proposal, only with more details, especially regarding some of the challenges that you need to solve in developing the tool. You should also include some screenshots if applicable and any other evaluation results.

There is no strict length requirement. You may target at anywhere between 4 pages (font 10, single column) and 6 pages (font 11, single column) without counting any necessary appendices. Actually, given the same amount of essential information, the shorter the better; of course, you will have to judge what counts as "essential information".

The project report should be emailed to the instructor and is due on May 7, Wednesday, 11:59pm.

Each project team only needs to submit one report. However, if there are multiple members in the team, you must include, for each member, at least one sentence to describe what he/she did exactly for the project, and also, please copy all the team members when you send the report, so that I know the report is agreed by all of you.

Since the purpose of the project report is to provide you an opportunity of going through research writing (I'll provide feedback about your report later by email), grading of the report will be mostly based on the clarity and completeness of the report itself (not so much on the project results). So aim at clearly describing what you have done and addressing all the questions that you are supposed to address (i.e., those questions you are asked to address in your presentation). In general, all the members of a team will get the same grade for the project unless the report indicates that some member(s) only superficially participated in the project without doing much actual work; in that case, I may discount the grade.