CSCI 544 — Applied Natural Language Processing
Research Article Presentation
Due dates
- By April 2, 2021: Choose partner, time slot, and article
- The earlier you choose, the more options available to you
- April 12–26, 2021: Article presentations (in class) and
submission of presentation materials
- April 12–26, 2021: Comment on other students’
presentations (in class)
Overview
The research article presentation is an activity where students
read an article of their choice and present it to the class.
The article can be on any aspect of natural language processing.
You will read the article, identify the central points of the research,
and present that research to the class.
You will also comment on research article presentations of fellow
students.
- The article must be published and publicly available.
- The article may not be taken from among the
required or optional readings for this course.
- The article presentation must be a new effort, conducted
specifically for this class. You may not reuse an
old presentation, or present an article that was read in another
class.
- Your presentation will be recorded on Zoom and available for the
class to see.
- You must submit your presentation materials (slides) within
24 hours after your presentation; the materials will be made
available to the class on Blackboard.
- You must engage with at least two other student presentations by
making substantial, live questions or comments on the presentation,
either by voice or through the chat feature on Zoom.
Procedure
- Find a partner for your presentation; you may use the Piazza
forum to team up together based on interests such as language and
topic. Since there is an odd number of students in the class, we
will approve one group of three students; please
talk to the course producers if you want to be in the group of
three.
- Select an original research article to present to the class;
a good place to look for articles is
the ACL Anthology.
The article may be in any area of language processing, and on any
human language.
The article does not need to relate to your written paper.
- Select an available presentation time slot from the presentation
spreadsheet (link will be provided on Piazza), and put your names,
the article title, and article URL in the appropriate fields.
- Article URL should be to the published version where possible
(not a preprint).
- Important: sign-up for slots and articles is on a
first-come, first-serve basis. When you sign up for your
slot, make sure nobody else is already signed up to present your
article. If you find that your article is already taken, choose a
different article.
- Present your chosen article in class at the assigned time.
- Attend at least one live presentation session
(it may be the one that you present in), and make substantial
questions or comments on at least two presentations
in that session using either voice or chat on Zoom.
- Submit your presentation materials (slides) within 24 hours
after your presentation.
Choosing a research article
- Pick an article which has an interesting theme, point, or
result. The article must be on Natural Language Processing.
Some examples of the main theme from articles read in class
are:
- Brill
(1992) shows that automatically-learned tagging rules can be
as effective as a statistical tagging model.
- Mikolov, Yih
and Zweig (2013) discover that training a model to predict the
next word in a sentence yields a representation that can solve
analogy questions.
- Levy,
Goldberg and Dagan (2015) show that an important factor in the
success of neural word embeddings is how contexts and associations
are set up.
The theme for presentation does not have to cover the entire article.
- If you cannot identify an interesting theme, point, or result in
your article, choose a different article.
- Remember that the audience would like to learn something new and
interesting. Pick a theme that can be presented within the allotted
time to an audience with the background covered in class.
Presenting a research article
- You have a slot of 15 minutes, including transition to the
next pair. Plan on presenting for about 8–9 minutes, leaving
about 5–6 minutes for questions and discussion. Practice your
presentation to make sure it fits within the allotted time.
- You are encouraged to use presentation slides;
remember that the conversation should revolve about
the content of research in the article, not about the slides.
- The audience has not read the article: assume no prior knowledge
of the topic on their part. You may assume knowledge of all the
methods and techniques covered in class, but not much beyond that;
if the article uses a new method or technique, explain it.
- Concentrate on presenting the main idea of the
article.
Present enough details and results to support the main idea,
but don’t get into such detail that the main idea gets lost.
- Explain the linguistic side of what the article is trying to
accomplish; you will probably also need to explain a little about
the language that is the object of study (unless it is English).
- Include some critical evaluation of the article’s content.
This is your evaluation of the article, not the
article’s evaluation section. The critique should
relate to content, not writing style. Some examples:
- Did you notice any flaws in the reasoning, evidence,
conclusions?
- Do you know of other facts that are relevant to this
study?
- Does this relate to something else you have studied or
observed?
- Can you think of a good follow-up?
April 12th
April 14th
April 19th
April 21st
April 26th
Grading
The grade for the presentation will be broken down as follows.
- 20% Organization of presentation (clarity, accuracy, thoroughness).
- 20% Delivery of presentation (clarity, accuracy, thoroughness;
not speaking style, fluency, nervousness).
- 10% Critical evaluation of article.
- 10% Fitting within the allotted time.
- 20% Response to questions.
- 20% Substantial comments on other student presentations.
The research presentation counts for 5% of the overall course grade.
