Link Search Menu Expand Document
USC CSCI-499 Spring 2024

Assignments and Grading

There will be three components to course grades:

Homeworks (40%)

Important Note about Academic Policy

For many of the assigned readings, the authors’ own slides and even video are publicly available. There are also tools like ChatGPT which are publicly available. While students may watch these videos and explore the capabilities of public language models, they must write their own homeworks and quizzes, and draw their own conclusions, as this discussion is intended to be the students’ own work. Non-adherence might amount to plagiarism, which amounts to a serious academic misconduct. If you find an assignment too difficult to follow, please use the available late days. In extreme situations, please let the staff know and your case will be considered.

Quizzes (15%) + Class participation (5%) (20% total)

Students are expected to participate in class discussions by not only asking questions, but also sharing their opinions on the topics under discussion. Students are also expected to turn in written quiz sheets, which will be distributed in some, but not all of the classes. Quizzes will be announced 2-3 days beforehand, and will cover 4-5 questions based on lecture materials and class discussions so far to be answered in 10-15 mins during class. OSAS students can turn in a scanned copy of the filled out quiz sheet to the instructor by 11:59 PM PT on the day of the quiz.

Class project (40% total)

Students must participate in teams of two or three (at maximum) complete a final research project on a topic related to the class. This project is expected to include work on language models.

Project Pitches (5%)

Every student pitches a 3 minute project idea for which all the other students vote. This will help the students choose project teams. The pitch should outline what problem is being solved and why should we care about it. It should make a connection to language models as a path to addressing the problem. It should also provide an idea of the inputs and outputs, ideally with real world examples. It is important to name the project idea for ease of voting.

Project proposal (5%).

Student teams should submit a ~1-page proposal (see format below*) for their project by Week 5. The proposal should:

  • state and motivate the problem by providing a problem or task definition (ideally with example inputs and expected outputs),
  • situate the problem within related work (this might help you find sources of data for training a model for your task),
  • state a hypothesis to be verified and how to verify it (evaluation framework), and
  • a brief description of the approach to be followed to verify the hypothesis (such as proposed models and baselines).

Project progress report (10%).

Student teams should submit a ~3-page progress report (see format below*) for their project by the end of Week 8 (March 4). This report should:

  • once again describe the project’s goals (it is okay if this has changed since the proposal),
  • contain all details on the dataset (your dataset should mostly be collected by now),
  • contain some initial results (think of this as a motivating result), and
  • must outline a concrete plan of what will be done for the final report.

While the initial results might be inconclusive, you are expected to have made non-trivial progress by this point. The project proposal may be repurposed for this report. Please take into consideration the earlier feedback you received, and address those inline (you may highlight these in a different text color if you wish to draw the instructor’s attention).

Project final presentation (10%).

This will be a 30 minute presentation, followed by 5 minutes of Q/A during the last three weeks of class. Points will be deducted if 30+5 min time limit is exceeded, so please practice with timing your talk. Each student in the team must present an equal share of the work. Each project presentation should describe

  • the research questions to be answered and the underlying motivation,
  • the proposed methods, and
  • their findings so far, as well as
  • address audience questions.

You will be awarded points for asking questions / participating in a discussion during the talks given by other teams. Your talk must use slides.

Project final report (10%).

Student teams should submit a ~6-8 page final report (see format below*) detailing all aspects of their project. The report should be structured like a conference paper, including an abstract, introduction, related work, and experiments; a tech report format is discouraged. Parts of the proposal and progress report may be reused for the final report. Negative results will not be penalized, but should be accompanied with detailed analysis of why the proposed method did not work as anticipated. You may include an appendix at the very end. References and the appendix di not count towards the main report page limit (i.e. can exceed 8 pages).

*All written assignments related to the final project should use the standard *ACL paper submission template.

Late Days

Students are allowed a maximum of 6 late days total for all assignments (but NOT the quiz sheets). You may use up to 3 late days per assignment. Using one late day for a project assignment involves each of the teammates using a late day each. Partial late days are not permitted. For every extra late day beyond the allowed late days, the student / team will lose 20% of the grade for the assignment.