Dialogue and Natural Language Generation
Student Presentations

Here are the links to the materials you will need for this assessment:

Each student is required to give a presentation to the rest of the class on one of the topics in the reading list. Please choose your topic early. This presentation should be based on one or two of the research papers listed on the module web page. The topic and the papers should be chosen to reflect the presenter's interests, and the presenter should identify at least 2 additional papers that are relevant to the topic chosen. You should read these papers as background for your presentation, so that you have an appreciation of the larger research context in which the particular paper(s) you have chosen as the main focus of your presentation fits. When preparing your presentation, the additional papers should be dealt with as related work, and you should describe briefly how the work reported in the main paper(s) compares to the work reported in the subsidiary papers.

Each presentation should be 30 minutes long, leaving 20 minutes for questions and general discussion. The presenter will lead the discussion period, so you should prepare questions to stimulate the discussion and keep it going if it begins to lag or get off the topic. The remaining members of the class will be the audience for the presentation and all members of the class are expected to attend and participate in the discussion and to provide feedback to the presenter.

Presenters are strong advised to do a dry run of their presentation to one or two friends/colleagues in order to get feedback on the content, organisation, format, style, use of materials, etc.

Skills to be Developed

The presentation is designed to help you develop the following skills:

The Mechanics of the Presentation

Presentations will begin on February 13 at the times assigned for lectures (plus other times, if necessary), which they will replace. There will be 1 presentation per 50 minute slot.

In discussion with the students, the lecturer will prepare a timetable of the presentations. It is inevitable that someone will be first, and hence fairly early in term.

The lecturer will fill in a pro forma giving feedback and a mark to the presenter. This will be given to the presenter within a week of their presentation. Note that the mark awarded is provisional and must be confirmed by the Board of Examiners.

The other students will also be provided with an anonymous peer review form, which they will fill in during the presentation. To preserve anonymity, these forms will be collected by the lecturer and given to the presenter at a subsequent presentation. These peer review forms do not form part of the assessment.

Here are some online guides to preparing presentations.

Please let me know which of these you find most/least helpful and if you find any better ones and I will edit the above list accordingly.

Acknowledgements: this web page based on course material prepared by Alan Bundy forInformatics Research Methodologies.

Johanna Moore


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