[wiki:HlpLab/LSA09/Syllabus Syllabus] | [wiki:HlpLab/LSA09/Assignments Assignments] | [wiki:HlpLab/LSA09/People People] | [wiki:HlpLab/LSA09/CorporaTutorials Corpora & Tutorials] | [wiki:HlpLab/LSA09/References Readings] | [http://lsa2009.berkeley.edu/courses/lsa125.html Offical LSA course page]

Assignments

Every student taking this class for credit is expected to attend classes, do the [wiki:Self/HlpLab/LSA09/Syllabus readings] before each class, and to hand in the assignments. BR

1. Collaboration

You are encouraged to collaborate on all assignments and to submit them together. We suggest a minimum of 3 and no more than 5 collaborators per assignment. You should choose different collaborators for at least one assignment. You are also encouraged to take advantage of the office hours. Meet with us (in groups or alone), ask, and discuss ideas. At least some of our office hours will be held outside to enjoy the sun (but let us know if you need to meet in one of the [link: computer rooms]). BR

2. Handing in assignments

Assignments should be handed in on paper. Given the short time of the institute, we cannot accept late assignments. Your TAs are taking their classes, too, so that we are on a very tight schedule. Thank you for your understanding. Assignments should have the class name, the assignment #, your name, and the names of your collaborators at the top. BR

3. Grading

A few words about grading to those who care:

we will provide answer keys to for the assignments. Only parts of the assignments will actually be graded in detail (corrected) given the number of students. Everybody gets full credit on the parts we won't be grading in detail.
class participation is important, too. Don't forget, this is for you. So ask questions. Don't be shy ;). BR

4. List of assignments

Total estimated work load (6-12 hours of reading; 5-10 hours of assignments plus final paper):

Due for every class: be prepared to summarize and discuss aspects of the reading with your fellow students at the beginning of the class. That includes the first class. We estimate about 1-2 hours of reading for each class (30-60 pages).
Assignment 1 -- Accounts of syntactic variation (handed out 7/7/09; due 12pm, Fr, 7/10/09): you will be asked to discuss the relation between accounts of syntactic variation given data patterns that we will tell you about. The goal of this assignment is to stimulate further thoughts on accounts of sentence production. You will also be asked to think about 1-2 phenomena that you could possible study as final class project and to describe them in 3-4 sentences each. We estimate that this assignment will take about 1-2 hours.
Assignment 2 -- TGrep2 assignment (handed out 7/14/09;due 12pm, Fr, 7/17/09): You will conduct your own TGrep2 searches to answer quantitative questions about variation phenomena. You will be required to extract data from syntactically annotated corpora, summarize them in tables, and to interpret the patters with regard to the accounts of language production you will have learned about. You can do the problem set we will give you, or you can ask us to start on your final research project to get preliminary data. We estimate that this assignment will take about 2-4 hours of group work.
Assignment 3 -- Regression analysis (handed out 7/20/09; due 12pm, Wed, 7/22/09): You will statistically analyze the data you extracted in the previous assignment using linear or logistic regression in R, or for those of you advanced enough, using mixed models. We estimate that this assignment will take 2-4 hours.
Final paper (due 6pm, Friday, 7/24/09): a small corpus-based research project accumulating in a 3 to absolutely maximally 5 page scientific paper (an introduction summarizing the background and motivating the research; description of study, design, corpus, data extraction, presentation of results, brief discussion and conclusion). We highly recomend you start working on this project before the final week, since you can reduce the load of the other assignments (you can submit the intermediate steps of the final project as the TGrep2 or stats assignment, see above).

We encourage projects on languages other than English (see list of available [wiki:HlpLab/LSA09/CorporaTutorials corpora] and ask us about other languages for which we may have corpora). Please use the [http://www.ccc.utexas.edu/cogsci08/submissions.html cogsci proceedings format] (we encourage you to use latex, but word is ok, too). You can use the endnote or bibtex files provided on the [wiki:HlpLab/LSA09/References reference] page. BR

Questions? Comments? Contact us if you feel that these requirements are too demanding or if you have other thoughts on the assignments. As we are working out the details, we can still adapt some things.