This document contains instructions for project proposals in the course Language Technology: Research and Development. The project proposals should contain two parts. The main scientific project proposal, and a short popular science abstract. These instructions are a modified version of the instructions from the Swedish research council (VR), for their calls for research project grants (see e.g. 2021 call for Humanities and Social Science)
According to the Swedish Research Council, a research plan should include the following headings in order:
* Given that you are not (yet) established researchers, you may not have much to say under the headings Significance and Preliminary 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 may 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 aims, at most one page to Survey of the field, 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 may be an additonal page 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 with experts either on linguistics and languages or on 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.
Describe the project in a way that makes it possible to understand for a person not familiar with the subject (or any other neighboring field). Avoid using terminology which might not be known to the general public (key terms can be used if they are explained). Describe why and how the research will be conducted, and explain in what way the new knowledge might be important.
The description may contain a maximum of 2000 characters, including blank spaces (approximately 2/3 A4 page in Times New Roman, size 12, single spacing). Note that this length limit is strict!
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.