This page last modified Thu August 29, 2013 9:52 AM. Important updates will be posted to Piazza.

Your open-ended task: Come up with a research idea related to one of the readings below and execute a pilot empirical study using one of the datasets below. The most important thing to me is that the idea is interesting; but do make some nod to feasibility in the given timeframe into account.

You should do required posting of your idea for your study to the course Piazza page as early as possible (preferably far ahead of the deadlines below), for two reasons: I will give you public feedback on your idea, indeed, multiple founds of it if you like — so feel free to post preliminary ideas if you'd like some help in choosing— and, because you are encouraged to work in groups, doing so will facilitate the finding of people with similar interests.

Also, if you have questions or interesting partial results or need help as you go along, please post to Piazza. Naturally, if you have useful feedback for others, please respond on Piazza. My thinking of typical scenarios might be issues with selecting some subset of the data, or noticing some odd behavior that needs explaining.

Basically, I'd like us to act as a team; we're all in this together!

Readings

• Gilbert, Eric and Karrie Karahalios. 2010. Understanding deja reviewers. Proceedings of CSCW, pp.225—228. [ACM link] [alternative link]
• Sections 4, 5 and 6 of: Gilad Mishne and Natalie Glance. 2006. Leave a reply: An analysis of weblog comments. Third Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem.

Datasets Permission to use something other than these must be obtained from the instructor well in advance of the due date.

• Supreme Court dialogs corpus
• Wikipedian conversations corpus: [zipfile] [README alone]
• Amazon Fine Foods reviews

Milestone deadlines

All deadlines refer to 11:59pm that night except, of course, for in-class activities.

• Sep 6:
• Finish the reading
• Post study idea(s) to Piazza. Be as detailed as possible while remaining sensible. If persons A, B, and C have already decided to work together, then A should post, and B and C should each individually respond on Piazza to A's post, each saying that they've agreed to work together; this way, I can tell who has finished this part of the assignment.
• If, subsequently, D and E want to join forces because your proposals are similar, please arrange to do so among yourselves, if the arrangement seems workable. This is why the deadline for CMS group formation is a bit later.
• Send an email to me, subject line “CS6742 CMS registration request”, giving your Cornell netID in the body (NOT your Cornell ID number, or your preferred email address, but your official Cornell NetID, which should be your initials followed by a number, e.g., LJL2), so I can add you to CMS.
• Sep 9: form groups on CMS. CMS group formation requires invitations and acceptance of invitations, i.e., action by two people per person added. You may form groups of any size. I need this information to schedule the group presentations.
• Sep 10: be prepared to informally discuss how things are going during class time.
• Sep 11: Submit a report on CMS. One group = one submission on CMS.
  Required information: the overall research problem you proposed, how it relates to the reading(s) (this description should provide evidence that you read the relevant parts of the readings carefully enough), proposed techniques (if applicable), processing and selection of data, results (probably preliminary, possibly negative), what you learned, a list of the roles that each member of the group played, if there is more than one person in your group. If you collaborated a bit with people outside your group, which can happen if group memberships shift, acknowledge those other people in the writeup.
• Sep 12: Group presentations. You can bring handouts (often most effective for discussions, since people can refer to things out of order) or project slides off a laptop. If the latter, bring a spare copy on a flashdrive.

Academic Integrity Academic and scientific integrity compels one to properly attribute to others any work, ideas, or phrasing that one did not create oneself. To do otherwise is fraud.

We emphasize certain points here. As you can see above, talking to and helping others is strongly encouraged. The easiest rule of thumb is, acknowledge the work and contributions and ideas and words and wordings of others. Do not copy or slightly reword portions of papers, Wikipedia articles, textbooks, other students' work, something you heard from a talk or a conversation, or anything else, really, without acknowledging your sources. See http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6742/2011sp/handouts/ack-others.pdf and http://www.theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/AcadInteg/ for more information and useful examples.