LING521

Project

Throughout this course, you should be working on a project of your own. You'll develop this project through a series of stages, resulting in a final project report that you should be able to submit (perhaps in an appropriately modified format) as a conference or journal paper. (Due dates for the four stages will appear here soon...)

The process includes a series of Project Notes -- you'll submit an updated set of notes each week during the course of the course.

1. The first set of notes, due 2/18, should start with brief descriptions of

• the question(s) you mean to address -- descriptive and/or theoretical;
• the data and methods you plan to use;
• (the beginning of) an annotated bibliography of relevant papers, dataset descriptions, software, etc.

It's fine to use this opportunity to continue work that you're already engaged in, but you should try to find a new (to you) aspect or extension. A completely new (to you) topic is also fine.

And it's OK if the questions, data, and methods evolve or even change completely over the course of the semester. In fact this is expected.

Each item in the "annotated bibliography" should include

• a reference with links -- use whatever format you please, as long as it's clear how to get to the referent;
• a brief summary of the content -- it will often work to cut and paste the abstract or similar introduction from the work itself;
• a few sentences of your own, evaluating the work, describing its relevance to your topic, etc.

2. The second set of notes, due _____, should extend the annotated bibliography with a section on data sources. Such sources might include

• Relevant speech datasets that are published or that are (or may be) available from their authors;
• Material that's available online or via standard commercial sources;
• Data that you've collected or plan to collect from human subjects.

If you need to collect new data from human subjects, then specify in as much detail as possible

• The overall design of the collection;
• The structure of each collection session;
• The materials to be used, with a plan to create any element that are missing;
• The IRB protocol to be used (which should be in hand by now -- if modifications or amendments are needed, the application needs to go in ASAP)
• The plan for data analysis.

3. The third set of notes, due ______, should present some preliminary analyses to illustrate the methods and hoped-for results of the planned project.