DUE: Monday, May 6, 10am. Put your printed copy in the box outside Jason Baldridge's office (CLA 4.738).
For the last assignment, you will write an essay that discusses the
ethical and social issues that arise with respect to one of the topics
from the course. Read ALL of the following instructions and make
sure you follow them. The instructions are here to help you do
a good job and get a good grade, not because I enjoy being so explicit…
You must submit a hard copy and email a PDF or Word copy to me and
the TA.
Warning: DON'T PLAGIARIZE. The penalties set out by the
university for plagiarism are quite heavy. I’m a computational linguist
with access to plenty of resources for comparing different texts, so it
probably is a bad idea to try it here…
Choose one of the following topics:
Document classification
Forensic linguistics
Dialog systems
Cryptography
Machine translation
And one of the following issues:
jobs
privacy
our perception of ourselves and what
it means to be human
language preservation and death
entertainment
cross-cultural communication
If you would like to write about a different topic and/or issue, please
get in touch with me and I'll let you know if they are appropriate.
You should make sure to include concepts covered in the course, e.g.:
writing systems and encodings
precision and recall
presupposition failure
shallow and deep methods
the computational theory of the mind
the Chinese room
emergence
homunculus
the uncanny valley
rule-based systems
machine learning
formal representations
robots and machine perception
grounded understanding
ciphers
brute-force attack
code-talkers
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
language differences
universal grammar
Your essay should touch on some of those concepts, probably not half,
and certainly not all of them – you only have 1000-1500 words after all.
The following information should be at the beginning of your essay:
Name:
UT EID:
LIN 313, Language and Computers, Spring 2013
Title:
Number of words:
Your essay should have the following attributes:
it is 1000-1500 words (no more, no
less)
it includes course concepts (such as
those suggested above)
it makes a clear thesis statement
(see below)
it has appropriate structure,
including introduction, body, and conclusion. Check out these
tips on
essay writing.
it references at least two relevant
outside sources: one or both must be a book or journal article and one
may be a magazine article (not a Wikipedia page or general website). For
magazines, publications like
Scientific American are
appropriate, but ones like
People are not.
(Ask if you
aren't sure.) More than one reference may be used. Don't
just
add bibliographic entries at the end of the essay – they should be
cited in context, within the essay in the portion(s) of the essay it is
relevant for, as well as having a bibliography at the end (and not as
footnotes). Some useful resources for finding outside sources:
UT Library,
Google Scholar,
Google Books.
it is typed (hand-written essays
won’t be considered)
it is free of spelling and grammar
errors (make sure to proof read it)
it is double-spaced
Examples of thesis statements include:
Better question answering systems
will help people find and maintain jobs by providing quicker and more
efficient access to information.
Better question answering systems
will lead to massive job losses by providing quicker and more efficient
access to information.
Document classification and other
automated filtering techniques threaten to undermine privacy rights by
allowing massive amounts of personal information to be searched quickly
and enabling decisions to be made automatically about that information
without human oversight.
Dialog systems will never be
accepted on a wide-scale because people will never be comfortable
dealing with machines that are not conscious.
Machine translation will
revolutionize the way we are able to share information across cultures
and languages by allowing people around the world to quickly communicate
with one another without the need for human translators.
As you can see, you can argue one way or the other – the important thing
is to back up your chosen thesis.
The following rubric will be used to score your essay.
Grammar/spelling: /15
Structure: /15
Clarity/Argumentation: /20
Originality/Relevance: /10
Use of course concepts: /10
Use of outside references: /10
Overall impression: /20
There is thus a total of 100 points, which will form 15% of your grade
(as
specified on the syllabus).