CSC 2520 The Computational Lexicon

Guidelines for Class Paper Presentations

Preparation:

You should read the paper very thoroughly, and look up any critical background information. Then read the paper again, thinking about the best way to present it – the best class presentation may not follow the order of presentation in the paper, as you might find that it’s better to group issues differently or explain in a different order. At that point, make an outline and a rough draft of your slides. (PowerPoint is preferred, but PDF files are fine.)

Guidelines for Content:

Presentations should be no longer than 15 minutes. They are intended to guide discussion, not thoroughly summarize the paper. You can assume that everyone has read the paper carefully, so you need only summarize at a very high level. You should focus on clarifying difficult aspects of the paper, and raising points for discussion. Keep in mind that you should be the expert on the paper. You don’t have to research all the background/context for the paper, but you should look up (or ask me about) terms or references that are critical to a good understanding of the paper.

The following is a suggested outline for your slides (5-8 slides total):

• One to two slides giving your view of the motivation, goals, main approach or contribution.
• One to three slides on topics that are central to the paper, especially those that may need some clarification. For example, these may be some key assumptions or definitions that are worth noting, or some of the details of the approach or the evaluation methods.
• One to three slides on items for discussion. Try to provide a mix of “detailed” items (e.g.: Is this evaluation method really informative? Is their assumption about X warranted?), and higher level items (e.g., Does this approach have promise for application to other areas? The authors have given a lot of details – what’s the big picture of how this works? What are some problems this kind of approach will face? What is the real contribution of the work?). (Note: Your questions/comments should not be as general as these examples, but rather “instantiated” versions of this kind of topic.)

Take the above as a guide, not a template you must follow. For example, you may find that it works better to interleave the more detailed and higher level topics.

Deadlines:

No later than Monday afternoon before your presentation, you should meet with me to go over the draft of your slides. The default times for these meetings will be 3pm and 3:30pm.

No later than Tuesday evening (6pm) before your presentation, you should email me the PDF or PowerPoint file for your slides, so that I can verify that I can load them properly.

No later than Wednesday morning at 9am you should email me the final slides, and bring by a “handout” copy of the slides to be photocopied for the class. (A handout in PowerPoint should be 4-6 slides per page; for a PDF file you should reduce the slides so that you can fit 2 per page.)