COR: Project 2 (30%)

Overview and Instructions

Important dates

You should do this in groups of 2 or 3.

Presentation

15-minute presentation + 5-minute question-answer period

Presentation methods: Slides (PowerPoint, Keynote) other forms of demonstration

Written report

A full research paper, complete with references and citations (ACL format; 8+2 pages)

If you add annotation to a corpus (or build a new corpus), you should also submit that (if it is too large to email, then give it to me personally)

Assessment

20% presentation, 10% participation (ask questions!), 70% written report

Assignment two topics

Your assignment must present original work. Good topics include (but are not limited to):

• Investigation of a linguistic research question, based on published corpora
• Investigation on a corpus that you have built yourself
• Comparisons of two or more corpora (of different genres, authors, languages, etc)

If you are conducting a research on ready-made corpora, pay particular attention to:

• Interpreting numbers correctly
• Make sure all relevant aspects have been explored; make sure your basis of comparison has been well-established; make sure your conclusions are sound If you are building your own corpus, pay particular attention to:
• The size of your corpus. Is it large enough for you to be able to find enough evidence for your investigation? Note that "sufficient data" depends on the nature of your inquiry.
• The genres of your corpus. Is it the "right" kind of corpus for the problem that you are trying to investigate? Is it as representative and balanced as you can make it?
• It takes a huge amount of time and effort to rigorously address these issues in corpus building.

If you are adding annotation to a corpus, you are encouraged (but not required) to add it to one of the existing LMS corpora:

• NTU Multilingual Corpus (annotate a phenomenon or two); play with or improve the sense tagging; add a new language
• Corpus of Hong Kong Cantonese 香港粵語語料庫
• Tatoeba Multilingual Corpus (annotate a phenomenon)

Since this project is for a class, I recognize the inherent limitation in your time and resources: you cannot build a perfect corpus in several weeks. I will take this into consideration, and give proper credit to good, creative corpus building efforts.

Upload the final paper online.

COR (Corpus Linguistics) main page.