Instructions for Project Proposals

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)

Guidelines for Scientific Project Proposals

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

Purpose and aims: Present the overall purpose and specific objectives of the research project.
Survey of the field: Outline previous research, as well as earlier research results in the field. Provide key references.
Project description: Summarize the project by describing:
- Theories and methods: 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.
Significance:* Describe the project's significance to the research area.
Preliminary results:* Describe your own experiments and pre-studies in the research area. If there are no preliminary results, this should also be stated.

* 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.

Guidelines for popular science abstract

Describe the project in a way that makes it possible to understand for a member of the general public 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!

File formats

Scientific project proposal

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.

Popular science abstract

The popular science abstract should be handed in as a plain text ".txt" file without any formatting. Note that the length of this abstract is counted as number of characters, including spaces, and that the maximum length is 2000 characters.

Grading

The 3-page proposal carries highest importance for the grade on this task, but we will also take the popular science abstract and the oral presentation into account. In order to get a passing grade (G) for the proposal, the following should be fulfilled:

In the written proposal:
- The main project idea should be articulated in an understandible way, with some motivation and grounding in previous research
- There should be one or a few research questions, and the proposed experiments should be related to the research question
- Some related work should be reviewed, and there should be a properly formatted reference list
- It should be clear what the main experimental design is and what data should be used, even though their may be some vagueness
- There should be a time plan
- The document should be no longer and not much shorter than 3 pages (excluding references), and the provided Latex templates (see below) should be used
The oral presentation should give a good summary of your project, and you should be able to answer questions about it
The popular scinece abstract should represent and motivate the project in a way that is understandable to the general public

For a VG, there is a qualitative judgement, where we require a clear motivation for the project with solid grounding in previous research, the experiments should be able to give a (partial) answer to the research questions, the related work should be well selected and relevant to the project, and the experiments and data should be clearly described.

The work you hand in should be written independently using your own words. You should follow standard citation practices in the field.