Choosing a Term Paper or Project
For the term project or paper, students will be expected to choose
from one of the following options:
- Term Paper
- A publishable term paper that adds substantially to the
present body of knowledge on some aspect of e-discovery. Students may
work individually or (for papers of very substantial scope) as a team
of two; for team papers the contributions of each co-author must be
clearly delineated. Term paper topics require prior approval from one
faculty member.
- Term Project
- An experimental investigation of some research
question. This might be a user study, development of a novel system or
component, or evaluation of one or more existing components. A written
report is expected, but (depending on the scope of the experimental
investigation and the nature of the results) it need not be in a
publishable form. Students may work in teams of any size, but the
contributions of each team member must be clearly delineated. The
research question, research method, and team composition require prior
approval from one faculty member.
- Structured Evaluation Exercise
- A structured evaluation exercise, modeled on the interactive
track of the TREC Legal Track. The scope of this exercise requires
that it be completed in a team in which students adopt specialized
roles. Completion of this exercise requires creation of
topics, submission of results, drawing of samples, and relevance
assessment and computation of results.
In addition, all projects require some form of written report (which
will be extensive for the term paper, of course, and which may be
briefer for the term project (depending on the scope of the
implementation effort). For the structured evaluation exercise, the
report should be comparable to a TREC
participant report. All teams will also be expected to make a
presentation to the class during the last class of the semester.
By the date indicated in the syllabus, each team should send an email
to both instructors with the names of the people on their team, their
team's choice from the three options above, and (except in the case of
the structured evaluation) a page or so of text describing their paper
or project. Please also identify the role(s) that each member of the
project team will fill (for all projects, including the structured
evaluation exercise). Any details sent in earlier emails (discussing
project options) should be repeated so that we will have everything in
one lace, but that information can simply be copied in its original
form (even if it exceeds the page or so that we have asked for).
The instructors will respond by email by Friday of the same week with
their approval, or with further guidance. Please cc your project
partners on your email so that they will receive the feedback at the
same time (that Friday is the start of Spring Break, and we don't want
our reply stuck in your unread email all week!).