185.054
Seminar in Artificial Intelligence, 3.0 ETCS / 2.0 Std. (WS 2011/12)

Topic:
Language and AI

This course will be held in English, unless all participants are fluent in German.

*** New/recent information ***

• Copies of some relevant handbook articles are now available, here [click] (password protected, username student)
• The (strict) deadline for submitting your essay is Monday November 28, 2011.
• The two sessions of talks has been fixed for Friday, January 13, 2012, 13.00-14.30 and Tuesday, January 17, 2012, 13.00-15.00. Both in Seminar room `von Nemann'.

Topic and Prerequisites:

This year's topic is language and AI. No particular knowledge in either AI or linguistics is required. However it is expected that participants are prepared to search for and assess scientific literature on an assigned topic in the intersection of linguistics, logics, and computer science. Moreover, ideally, participants should already have some experience in preparing a seminar paper and a corresponding presentation (including a handout).

Requirements:

• Participants are required to prepare a short paper (7-10 pages) on the topic assigned at the organisational meeting (see above).
  
• It is strongly recommended to use LaTex for the preparing seminar paper. In any case, the paper has to satisfy usual academic standards regarding citations, references, structure etc. (See below for some corresponding hints and advice.)
  Participants should bear in mind that their papers will be carefully checked by at least some of their colleagues (see below) and, moreover, will be made available to everybody on the Web.
• The presentations are on the same topic as the seminar papers.
  Note that the talks take place after the papers will have been made available to all participants. (In January - details will follow later)
• Each presentation has to be accompanied by a one page handout.
  The handout has to contain your data (name, Matrikelnummer, etc) and should concisely sum up the key concepts introduced in your talk. It also has to contain full references to relevant literature.
• Each participant will be assigned two papers of other participants for formal reviewing.
  The purpose of this part of the seminar is to train your ability to evaluate and comment on seminar contributions by other participants in a systematic and structured manner. (See Guidelines, below).
  Motivation: Reviewing abilities are of utmost importance in a scientific context. All researchers, including `beginners', are regularly asked to formally act (anonymously) as referees/reviewers of workshop abstracts, posters, research papers, research proposals etc. submitted by other researchers. Peer reviewing - as this part of scientific working is called - is an essential ingredient of scientific progress in general and of each researcher's individual career in particular.

Guidelines for the reviewing process:

• You will receive an Email containing two numbers, by latest Wednesday, November 30. These numbers refer to the two essays that you are assigned to review, as listed under be below under `Further meetings' as downloadable PDFs.
• You should write a detailed referee report on the two assigned essays using the prepared Report Form (click here). You may add (but not delete) as many additional lines as you wish.
  
• IMPORTANT: Prepare your reports in ASCII format (i.e., pure text: no .doc, .pdf, .ps files!) and send them as separate emails to chrisf@logic.at (Subject: SemAI Report No. ...). Don't forget to add the corresponding number of the reviewed essay to the subject field of your email.
• Deadline for submitting the reports is Monday, January 9, 2012
• IMPORTANT: the evaluation of your own seminar essay by other participants will not be the basis for the overall evaluation (credits) of your performance in the seminar.
  However the quality of your evaluation of other essays will influence the credits assigned.

Further meetings (Schedule of talks):

Note that finally we will have only two meetings for presentations.
They will take place in seminar room von Neumann, Favoritenstraße 9 / ground floor.

• (1) Hilbert Heikenwälder: Sytnax [Seminar paper 1] [Handout]
• (2) Matthias Jakubec: Semantics [Seminar paper 2] [Handout]

• Nestori Torma: Question Answering [Seminar paper 3] [Handout]
• Andreas Hübler: Information Extraction [Seminar paper 4] [Handout]
• [Michael Wessner: Machine Translation - cancelled]
• Christian Flicker: Pragmatics and Dialogue [Seminar paper 5] [Handout]

Further information:

Hints for the preparation of seminar talks and papers
(Partly in German)

• Why use LaTeX?
• Writing Tips - Collected Links on Scietific Writing
• Collected Advice on Research and Writing
• Introduction to Journal-Style Scientific Writing
• Folien zur Einführung Wie gestalte ich einen Vortrag? von Uwe Egly
• The quick guide to referencing [PDF] - a good (Harvard) source for the important topics of referencing and plagiarism.
• Avoiding Plagiarism (Wie vermeide ich Plagiatsvorwürfe?) - please read (at list) this short introduction to this important topic carefully if you are uncertain about what is expected!
  [The attempt to submit an essay that consists just in material directly lifted from other source may have dire consequences. In any case, it will result in a negative evaluation.]
• Ausführliche Linksammlung zum Thema Richtig Zitieren

Evaluation/credits

1. your seminar talk,
2. your seminar paper,
3. your evaluation of other seminar papers,
4. your contributions to the discussions.

Communication:

Seminar papers, but also other comments, requests, etc., should be addressed to chrisf@logic.at.

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