EEE 486/586

Statistical Foundations of Natural Language Processing

Spring 2025

Term Project

General Instructions

Project: As part of EEE 486/586, students must propose, formulate, solve, implement
a complex experimental term project and finally produce a written report in an academic
paper format. The project should demonstrate one or more concepts related to fundamen-
tal topics covered in EEE 486/586. Although obtaining state-of-the-art results will not be
expected, students are encouraged to propose and attack open-ended problems which may
optionally lead to future research endeavors instead of performance-based software oriented
applications. Emphasis will be given on the originality of the problem, approach, method-
ology, proper literature surveying, proper comparison of results with the state-of-the-art,
and the quality of presentation, scrutiny, written communication and discussion of project
outputs. You are also expected to accumulate experience on writing research oriented docu-
ments, develop an efficient organizational structure for your written outputs where you can
present results of your experiments and organize your findings, insights, and conclusions in a
technical and precise manner. Groups are strongly discouraged to implement same/similar
projects and emphasize that “originality will play an important role in their final grade”.
Moreover, some relatively simple projects are not allowed (that is the one of the reasons
why the instructor must approve the proposals).

Groups: Students are expected to work as groups that have already been determined and
posted.

Project Themes: Students are expected to propose their term projects subject to a given
“Project Themes” handout where a wide range of themes, their descriptions and starter
reading lists are provided. In other words, proposals outside these themes will not be ac-
cepted.

Important remarks:

(a) The project should be your original work.

(b) You are allowed to use any software infrastructure and NLP specific libraries.
(c) If a group member decides to withdraw from the course, remaining members will con-
tinue the project according to the original plan.

(d) As an Appendix to the final report, a statement should be included, in which each
group member’s contributions to the project are explained. If one or more group mem-
bers fail to contribute to the project fairly, this should be stated. Based on these
statements as well as his assessments during presentations, the instructor
reserves the right to assign different individual term project grades within a
group. Individually performing students need not to include this statement.

(e) Please see the following for information about academic honesty and plagiarism:
http://ascu.bilkent.edu.tr/Academic Honesty.pdf

(f) Please also recall the Plagiarism Policy as given in the course syllabus on Moodle.

Outline of the Term Project:

(1) Proposal (2 pts. of the overall 35 pts.)

(2) Survey Report (5 pts. of the overall 35 pts.)

(3) Presentation (5 pts. of the overall 35 pts.)

(4) Final Report (23 pts. of the overall 35 pts.)

Please refer the detailed explanations and expectations below for details for each component.
1. Proposal (1-2 pages)

A term project proposal must be prepared by each group to describe in detail the following
information:

(a) Name of the project.

(b) What are you going to work on? What is the purpose of your project?
(c) Why are you inspired to work on that topic?
(d) What kind of study will your project be? Which approaches and methods will it use?
(e) A short literature review on previous studies that are related to the topic and problem
that you have chosen.
(f) Which data are you planning to work with?
(g) A Gantt chart that lists individual work packages within the project. Each group
member’s expected contribution to the project should also be briefly specified.

The deadline for the Proposal is Sunday February 23. Following the evaluation of
the proposal, feedback will be given if necessary.

2. Survey Report (5 pages + appendices if necessary)

In this part of the project, you will be basically expanding Part e of your proposal. A detailed
literature survey needs to be prepared. At least 10 academic papers will be discussed and
compared in the Survey Report. Please read chapters of academic papers with titles “Related
Work”, “Previous Work” and the like as well as some survey papers in order to grasp the
general style and expectations of this part of the project.

The deadline for the Survey Report is Sunday March 16. Following evaluation of
the report, feedback will be given if necessary.

3. Presentation (10-12 minutes)

A presentation of the term project will be recorded and be submitted to Moodle for every
group. The presentation is expected to be at most 10 mins long. The deadline is May
14th Wednesday.

4. Final Report (10 pages + appendices)

After the project is completed, a final report must be prepared by each group. The de-
tailed expectations from the final report will be given below in Proposal & Final Report
Preparation section.

The deadline for the Final Report is May 14th Wednesday.

Proposal, Survey Report & Final Report Preparation

1. Should be typeset, no handwriting is allowed.

2. Must be uploaded to Moodle.

3. For each report, a single PDF file should be submitted with titles:
‘group_[group number]_proposal.pdf’ (for the proposal)
‘group_[group number]_survey.pdf’ (for the survey)
‘group_[group number]_report.pdf’ (for the final report)
Please refer the list that will be announced to find your group number.

4. The final report should have a Title that communicates the technical content of the
project.

5. Names of all group members should be present on all submissions.

6. The final report should contain an Appendix section containing all of your code.

7. The final report should also contain an Appendix section containing the statement
regarding the contributions of the members. (Please see the Important Remarks
above for details.)

8. The Final report should contain the following sections clearly separated with head-
ings: Abstract, Introduction, Related Work, Methods, Results, Discus-
sion&Conclusion, References. The details of each section are given below:

Abstract: A one-paragraph summary of all major aspects of your report from Introduction
to Discussion. No references should be given, and the abstract should be self-contained.

Introduction: Establish the topics under study by briefly overviewing the existing litera-
ture. State the purpose of your work, and why it is an interesting/important question to
tackle. Explain the methodology that you will be using to address these questions, and
what outcomes are expected as a result of your efforts. Give a brief summary regarding the
organization of the remaining sections of your report.

Related Work: Elaborate, in more detail, on the previous related work regarding your
project topic. Give a solid literature review for your topic. Briefly explain important prior
art and make compare&contrasts when necessary. You can start from your Survey Report
part of the project to build this section. Indeed, as you work on your project through the
semester, you should be tackling new previous work so that you can modify, revise and
expand your Survey Report to finalize this section.

Methods: Explain your approach and methods that you use. Explain the data that you
will be examining. If working on a simulated dataset, you should describe the conditions
under which the simulation takes place. If working on a data that you collect, describe the
procedures followed. If working on a publicly available dataset, give references and list main
properties of it. Describe all qualitative/quantitative analyses you used. If parameter/model
selection is necessary in your methods used, clearly state the motivation for the specific set
of parameters/models selected. The methods section should be fully referenced, and should
contain subheadings for explaining different methods/analyses.

Results: Present your key results, illustrate your outputs visually with the help of figures
and tables. Detailed numbers/plots should be provided in illustrations, and each figure
or table should contain a paragraph-long, self-contained caption that explain the contents.
Information presented in a table or a figure should not be reiterated in the main text, but fig-
ures/tables should be referenced in appropriate sections and the main trends/results should
be stated in the text. Statistical significance of any result should be reported.

Discussion & Conclusion: Interpret your results in light of previous work on the project
topic. What insights can you derive from your results? Do your results and analyses tell you
anything new beyond current knowledge? Which parts of your methods worked, and which
failed? What could you do to improve your results? What are the advantages-disadvantages
of your approach and methods? Did you reach the goals that you set out in the Introduc-
tion? Did your work produce the expected outcome? What could be the future work?

References: A list of all referenced material formatted according to standard conventions

used in journals. Crude, unformatted lists are not acceptable.