syllabus.txt

Final Project
In this course, students are expected to conduct research on the topic described below.
Teams
You may work in teams of up to four on the final project. Teams must be finalized by Oct 24 2018. 
Topic
The goal of this project is for you to build a neural machine translation system and experience how recent advances have made their way. Each team will build the following sequence of neural translation systems for two language pairs, Vietnamese (Vi)→English (En) and Chinese (Zh)→En (prepared corpora will be provided):

Recurrent neural network based encoder-decoder without attention
Recurrent neural network based encoder-decoder with attention
Replace the recurrent encoder with either convolutional or self-attention based encoder.
[Optional] Build either or both fully self-attention translation system or/and multilingual translation system.

You are expected to implement these on your own (if necessary), experiment them with both language pairs, report their performance (measured in terms of automatic evaluation metrics) and analyze their behaviours and properties.  
Paper
The final report should include the description of the task, models, experiments and conclusion and be up to 6 pages long excluding unlimited pages reserved for references. It must be prepared in LaTeX in conformance with NAACL style (a.k.a. ACL style for 8.5x11” paper). Your paper should include a link to a public GitHub repository containing the code used in your experiments.
Contribution Statements
The final report must state (in one or two sentences) the contributions of each team member. Team projects which fail to include this will receive a 50% grade deduction.
Key date
Project submission 12/14 11.55pm