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:
- 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.
- 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:
- The project must be relevant to computational linguistics or human
language technology more broadly.
- The project (or portion thereof relevant to compling) must include at
least 200 hours within a four-month period.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- In which ways/areas did you excel during the course of this project?
- Identify some areas for improvement: What can you work on to become
more effective in this line of work?
- 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:
- The student's work ethic and degree of self-direction during the
project.
- The overall quality of work carried out.
- The student's contribution to the project:
Did the intern bring in additional information sources?
Contribute original ideas and new directions?
- 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:
- A description of the activities undertaken during the project and
their results (5 pages).
- A discussion of how the CLMS course work related to/prepared the
student
for the project (2 pages).
- 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:
- Pre-project proposal due: 5/25
- Pre-project proposal agreed: 6/15
- Supervisor and student agreed on the project and committed to it.
- Post-project report (initial version) due: 7/20
- Self-evaluation with supervisor's approval due: 8/05
- Supervisor's evaluation due: 8/10
- Post-project report (final version) due: 8/10