Guidelines for Project Proposals

According to the Swedish Research Council, a research plan should include the following headings in order:

• Purpose and goals: Give an overview of the project purpose and specific goals.
• State of the art: Summarize the state of the art in the research area of the project. Give key references.
• Significance and scientific novelty:* State briefly how the project relates to previous research in the area and describe its short-term and long-term significance.
• Preliminary and previous results:* Describe briefly your own research and pilot studies in the area that supports the feasibility of the project.
• Project description: Describe the project design including the following parts:
  • Theory and method: Describe the underlying theory and the methods that will be used to reach the project goals.
  • Time plan and implementation: Describe briefly the time plan and how the project will be carried out.
  • Project organization:* Explain how different participants will contribute to the project. Describe and motivate the competence and role of all project participants.

Given that you are not (yet) established researchers, you may not have much to say under the headings Significance and scientific novelty and Preliminary and previous results. Similarly, the subheading Project organization is less relevant for a one-person project. These sections (marked by an asterisk) are therefore optional. This means that you can use them if you have something relevant to say, but you should exclude them otherwise.

Of the remaining (obligatory) sections, you should devote at most half a page to Purpose and goals, at most one page to State of the art, and at least one and a half page to Project description. The entire proposal should be at most 3 pages long (and not much shorter), , excluding references (i.e. there should be maximum 3 pages of contents, but there can be additonals pages with references.) The length requirement is strict, and you will not be able to reach a higher grade if your proposal is too long.

Note that project proposals are often evaluated by relatively broad panels who are not necessarily experts on specific subjects. Language technology projects are typically evaluated by panels either on linguistics and languages or computer science. It is thus important that your proposal is accesible also to non-experts in language technology. You need to balance a general description of your topic, with enough technical details.

Template

You should use the following LaTeX document as a template for your proposal: project-proposal.tex. In order to process the file, you will also need the following example bib file: project-proposal.bib.