Final Projects

N.B.: This course is finished. I am maintaining this website for visitor's benefits. The projects below were done by the students in the Fall of 2003. Students were required to make a poster presentation, these are the slides that were used. Their final project submission was a paper in the form of a normal conference submission (8-10 page limit). If you have any questions about the project or would like to get a hold of their final report, please email the appropriate student(s).

• Chan Yee Seng, Automated Argumentative Zoning of Scientific Articles. [ Slides ]
• Guo Shuqiao, Chen Xi and Wang Xiaohang, Automatic Syntactical Taxonomy Generation. [ Slides ]
• Huang Wendong, Structured Query in Digital Libraries. [ Slides ]
• Li Ying Guang and Tok Wee Hyong, DL Porter - A Peer-to-peer Helper for Digital Libraries. [ Slides ]
• Lin Li and Wong Swee Song, Generating Indexes for MEDLINE Documents through Clustering. [ Slides ]
• Qiu Long, Lexicon-Based Spelling Correction in Author Search. [ Slides ]
• Hendra Setiawan and Edward Wijaya, Music Video Summarization. [ Poster (.pdf) ]
• Artem Vorobiev, Stable and Attack-Protected Digital Library Networks which allow Document Publishing. [ Slides ]
• Wang Gang, Correcting speech recognition errors using auxiliary data and NLP knowledge. [ Slides ]
• Yang Hui and Maslenni Mstatislav, Exploiting the Web to Answer List Questions. [ Slides ]

Project Overview

Students are expected to engage in a research project for the duration of this course, and produce a poster presentation, a research paper and a demo (if applicable) at the end of the course. Ideally, the research project tackles a current research problem, and proposes an original solution. The research paper should be of publication quality.

You are to work in a group of maximum 3 students for the research project.

A good research project must (i) define a problem (ii) propose a solution (iii) implement the solution (simulated or real solution), and (iv) evaluate againsts existing solutions.

Your research project can be of the following natures:

• New research problem/solution - You define a new, interesting problem and propose a solution. Your solution does not have to be real good, since you are pioneering a new area of research.
• Existing research problem/new solution - You look at an existing, interesting problem, and propose a new, novel solution that is better than existing solutions, which can lead to new ways of looking/understanding the problem. Your solution doesn't have to outperform existing methods in all categories but at least in some particular domain. For example, we are concerned with digital libraries in this course. It will suffice if your solution for typical documents in digital libraries is statistically significantly better than in the more general case.
• Existing research problem/compare existing solutions - You look at an existing problem and its solutions. Implement the solutions, compare them and provide new insights to why one solution is better than another. Provide public-domain software for letting others share and use your work.
• Build an innovative system - Build a novel application that no one, or few, have built before. But most importantly, identify new issues in your system that no existing solutions can adequately solve.
• Empirical analysis of some collected data - Researchers often need to build systems that actually solve or improve on real problems. Papers that analyze the usability of systems or characterize the data in some way assist others to understand the problem or the clientele (our users) for a particular problem.

Remember, good research always teaches other researchers something new.

I do not expect you to write the code from scratch. In fact, if you have an account on sf3/sunfire, you can access a host of related software that I use in my research, in the NLP/IR software repository. Feel free to suggest to me other resources that you feel would be useful to have installed and available to the class.

Suggested Projects

Below you will find a list of possible final projects. As this is a seminar, research course, you will be primarily assessed on the work you do on the final project. As such I expect and demand that each student/team of students achieve some novel research development or finding that is not a rehashing of the existing literature. The midterm survey paper is intended to foster this understanding and encourage you to poke into new territories.

You are welcome and encouraged to propose alternate projects. I have listed some ideas for projects in certain areas. Teams that have taken projects that interest them and/or have relevance to their research or jobs seem to always do best.

• Social Network Analysis
  • Building a better citation parser
  • Citations, weblinks and friends (as expressed by handphone namelists)
  • Link types on the web for different genres
  • Exploring the relationships between prestige, authorities and hubs
  • Centrality and density of different genres of websites
  • Automatic computation of an area's journal and conference reputations
• Access and Usability Issues
  • Multi-object summarization
  • The use of VR and immersive environments in the DL
  • Efficient, social network visualization
  • Semantic Web: its promise and in practice
  • Crosswalking of metadata: a critique of current approaches
  • Taking semistructured data further than a bag of words
• User modeling
  • Classifying browsing and searching strategies based on information trails
  • Differences in retrieval effectiveness in speech queries as opposed to text/typed queries
• Conceptual Search / Polysemy and synonymy
  • Query expansion and restriction from user query logs
  • Automatic jargon and terminology canonicalization
• Classification and Filtering
  • Automatic ACM classification for theses and technical reports
  • Web Page script and applet classification
  • Home page interest networking
• Digital Library Creation
  • Corpora Gatherer - Focused Crawling
  • GIS: Integration of maps at different scales
  • Inferring useful metadata for genres of web documents
  • Critique of the plans for the NUS Digital Library
  • Motion library for sports instruction
  • Dateline and timeline history collection and canonicalization
• Digital Library Cataloging and Indexing
  • Multimedia Metadata Features
  • Language Detection
• Digital Library Policy:
  • Exploring the integrity of skyreading/skyreading and its effect on scholarship.
  • Cost models for the digital library in specialized domains/forms of media
  • Convenience, user rights and usability of linkages in the digital library
• Authorship Analysis
  • Styles and Genres for authorship identification in web pages
  • Linkage styles and classification for webpage creators

You can find more relevant papers in these and other topic areas on other DL courses that have been held at other institutions, including:

• Richard Furuta's Digital Libraries course at Texas A&M
• C. Lee Giles's Information Retrieval, Digital Libraries & the Web course at UPenn
• Deborah Barreau's Digital Library Foundations course at Catholic U.

Information on the Project Writeup

Your team's write-up may take the form of a research paper intended for a conference or journal submission (strongly encouraged, 10 page limit) or a technical report, limited to thirty (30) pages, excluding preface, appendices and bibliography. Conference papers are generally much shorter but take a lot of time to prepare. Selected final projects will be asked to submit their work to the relevant conference or journal.

Acceptable styles include:

Conferences:

• JCDL 04 - Deadline 15 Jan 2004
• ECDL 2003 - ECDL 2004
• SIGIR 2003 - SIGIR 2004
• ECIR 2003 - ECIR 2004 - Deadline 1 Nov 2003
• CIKM 2003 - CIKM 2004
• WWW 2003 - WWW 2004
• ICADL 2003
• WebDB 2003
• Coling 2004

Journals:

• First Monday
• D-Lib Magazine

Information on the Project Presentation

On the last class session we will not have class. In lieu of the missed class session, on the following Saturday, we will meet for two hours. It will be broken up into two 55-minute periods. Class projects will be assigned to either Group 1 (presenting in the first 55 minute session) or Group 2 (presenting in the second session). The presentation will be poster style (with demos, as appropriate). If you are not presenting in a session, walk around the class and learn about your peers' projects. You will be asked to assess their projects and turn your assessments in.

Poster presentation exchange. Students from other classes will be coming in to review and learn about your project, so be ready to answer their questions as well. In return for their assessment, you will be required to attend and review at least one other graduate course's poster presentation to review and participate in their evaluation. Quick Links: [ Home ] [ IVLE ] [ Project Info ] [ Schedule ] [ Details ] [ HW 1 ] [ HW 2 ]

Joint evaluation project web site: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs5248/showcase.html. Guidelines for the poster construction are also up on the web: http://www.nss-mic.org/2002Mting/author2002.html#PosterGuidelines. We're largely borrowing from the guidelines given by the 2002 IEEE NSS/MIC website. See IVLE for more details.

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Created on: Sat May 10 12:14:03 2003 | Version: 1.0 | Last modified: Tue Sep 19 09:31:00 2006