UW CLMS Project Option

Project option: 10 credits of LING600

The intent of the project option is for students to contribute to on-going research or related activities, not to carry out independent projects. Students interested in proposing their own projects should pursue the thesis option.

Under the project option, there are two possibilities:

  1. The student works with a third-party supervisor (a.k.a. "project supervisor"). The project supervisor does not need to be affiliated with UW. The choice of project and project supervisor must be pre-approved by one of the CL faculty, who serves as the student's advisor.
  2. The student works with a CLMS faculty member, who serves as both advisor and project supervisor.
In both cases, it is the student's responsibility to find a CompLing related project and someone on the project who is willing to serve as their project supervisor and allow them to work on the project. In addition, the project supervisor and the student's advisor must both agree on the content of the project (as discussed in the student's pre-project proposal) before the student starts working on the project.

The requirements for the project option

For a project to count towards the MS degree, all the following requirements must be met:

  1. The project must be relevant to computational linguistics or human language technology more broadly.

  2. The project (or portion thereof relevant to compling) must include at least 200 hours within a four-month period.

  3. Before the project starts, the student should write a pre-project proposal (4-6 pages) that includes the plan for the project, a discussion of why the project is related to CompLing, and a list of relevant references. The proposal needs to be approved by both the student's adviser and project supervisor, who can be the same person.

  4. At or near the end of the project (prior to graduation), the student will write a self-evaluation which they will present to the project supervisor for approval and then to the faculty advisor. The student's self-evaluation should answer the following questions:
    1. Briefly describe the tasks you have carried out in the project so far, as well as those which you are still working on and their estimated dates of completion.
    2. In which ways/areas did you excel during the course of this project?
    3. Identify some areas for improvement: What can you work on to become more effective in this line of work?

  5. If the supervisor for the project is NOT the same as your faculty advisor, the supervisor must send the faculty advisor a confidential evaluation, via the Google Form here, which references the self-evaluation. If this evaluation does not indicate satisfactory work, the report will not count. The supervisor's evaluation should comment on the following areas:
    1. The student's work ethic and degree of self-direction during the project.
    2. The overall quality of work carried out.
    3. The student's contribution to the project: Did the intern bring in additional information sources? Contribute original ideas and new directions?

  6. At or near the end of the project (prior to graduation), the student must write a post-project report (of 11-15 pages), with the following structure:
    1. A description of the activities undertaken during the project and their results (5 pages).
    2. A discussion of how the CLMS course work related to/prepared the student for the project (2 pages).
    3. A second version of the literature review. We expect this to be different from the initial version in incorporating the additional perspective gained in the course of the project as well as any additional key papers that the student discovered in the course of the project. (4-8 pages)

The deadlines for the project option

The departmental approval for conferral of graduate degrees is the Sunday after the Friday of finals week. Accordingly, we have established the following deadlines for the project option: