Final exam

Background

Final examination in this class takes the form of a ‘home exam’, i.e. a project that students can work on over a period of three weeks.  Like for the exam-qualifying obligatory assignments, group work (in teams of up to three students) is encouraged.  Team composition needs to be declared at the start of the exam period and, cannot be changed after April 16, 2021.  Also, each team needs to decide beforehand which of the available tracks they want to research; these ‘tracks’ of the exam will be introduced in the lecture on April 15 (examples from previous years have included named entity recognition, negation resolution, and sentiment analysis).  Further background on the tracks and supporting data and code are available through the course GitHub repo.  Please announce your team composition and choice of track no later than April 16 by emailing the course contact address in5550-help@ifi.uio.no.

The main exam period will be Thursday, April 15, to Friday, May 6, 2021.  Once a team declares their track (by email, see above) they will receive a written set of suggestions for how to approach the research project.  During the exam period, there will be no lectures, but group sessions will run according to the regular schedule.  During the weeks 16 and 17, project teams will be offered  mentoring sessions (of around 30 minutes) with one or two of the track chairs (the course instructors); these session will be organized by individual tracks. 

Upon submission of the home exam (in the form of a scientific paper), there will be a peer reviewing period where we also require students to contribute feedback on submissions by others (in a double-blind, anonymous fashion); reviews will be due on May 14.  Each team will then be required to revise their manuscript (if accepted/approved by the chairs) according to the feedback from reviewers and the area chairs and submit the final, camera-ready version by May 25.  Finally, the workshop itself will be held in the lecture slot on Thursday, May 27, starting at 12:15.  Here, all groups/students will give a short presentation of their approach and results, and there will be an award ceremony of the best paper(s) selected by the WNNLP programme committee.  This session will be the final gathering of the class this term.

Schedule

Submissions

Submissions must be formatted according to the standard style files of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2021): Please start from the ACL template files for the easy-to-use and premium-quality LaTeX typesetting system (strongly recommended) or M$ Word.  The laboratory session on April 20, 2021, will be partially devoted to best practices for paper writing in LaTex.  Submissions should be minimally five pages long and must not exceed eight pages in total length, including all tables and figures, but not counting the list of bibliographic references (i.e. the final, unnumbered References section).  All papers submitted for review must be anonymous, i.e. not reveal author identities.  However, for full replicability, each submission must be backed up by a private repository (in the UiO installation of GitHub, as always) providing all code, scripts, possibly additional data, and at least minimal instructions on how to run and evaluate the system.  The code repository will only be visible to track chairs, i.e. please make sure to share it with the instructors in GitHub.  All submission must be uploaded electronically no later than May 6 to the on-line conference management site Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wnnlp2021. It will be possible to revise and resubmit, so please make your initial submission well before the deadline.

Camera-Ready Manuscripts

All submissions that have been accepted for publication are published as part of the proceedings volume for the workshop, essentially a peer-reviewed edited anthology.  Authors are required to revise their manuscript in the light of reviewer comments, seeking to address any errors, resolve any sources of potential unclarity, improve presentation and language, polish bibliographic references, and change to non-anonymous formatting.  To make these changes, final, camera-ready manuscripts can use one additional page of text, i.e. the page limit is extended to up to nine pages in total length (still not counting the bibliography).  Final manuscripts (in PDF) must be uploaded through the EasyChair submission system no later than Tuesday, May 25 (23:59 CEST).