Project Milestone 1: Project Proposal

The project is a chance for you to delve into one of the topics we have covered in class. You can choose between two directions: creating a novel interactive experience or answering a research question. The final deliverable will a poster presentation and either a demo or a paper.

If you are trying to decide between multiple project ideas, or if you’re struggling to come up with something, we highly encourage you to come to office hours and discuss it with Dr. Martin. She will be able to help you narrow down which ideas of yours are the most feasible + interesting.

For this milestone, you will pick whether you are doing a demo or a paper and then write a project proposal that contains the following sections. Guiding questions are given to help you fill out each section.

Demo: Build a novel interactive experience

Use the techniques we have learned in class to build a novel interactive experience that involves generated text. While fine-tuning a large language model on a custom dataset or few-shot prompting your model could be a component of your project, we are expecting something more involved than just this. Can you expand on the homeworks to build a text-based game that uses language models to make a novel and fun game experience? Can you incorporate elements of classical planning or dialogue systems into your generation? By the end of the semester, you should have a demo that runs either in a Python Notebook or on a website showcasing your interactive experience.

Write a project proposal that includes the following sections:

1. Project Description: What novel interactive experience do you propose to design? You’re not stuck with whatever design decisions you make here, but this will be your starting point.
   • Give an example mockup of what the user experience will look like.
2. Data: What data will be needed to build your interactive experience?
   • Does the needed data already exist? If so, how much data is available?
   • What does the data look like?
3. Proposed Method: How will you be using text generation systems or other concepts from class in order to enable the interactive experience? Will you need to train your own neural networks?
   • Write 2-3 paragraphs explaining your proposed method.
   • Give an example diagram of the backend system.
4. Related work: Do similar games/experiences exist to the one you propose to create?
   • Give pointers to them and explain how you think they relate to your project idea.
5. Team members: Give a list of the students who will participate in this project, and what contribution you expect each one to make to the project.
6. LLM Use Statement: Describe exactly how you used LLMs to generate parts of your proposal document (refer to the syllabus for guidance). If you did not use any generative text, please state so in this section.

Paper: Attempt to answer a research question about text generation or interactive fiction

In class, we have discussed multiple open questions related to text generation. Choose one of these questions and conduct experiments to attempt to answer the question. By the end of the semester, you should have an academic paper that describes the research question, the experiments you ran to try and answer it, and an analysis of the experimental results.

Write a project proposal that includes the following sections:

1. Project Description: What research question or problem are you trying to solve?
   • Write a problem definition (1 to 2 paragraphs)
   • Give an illustrative example of the problem and/or your proposed solution.
2. Data: What kind of data will you need to train and evaluate your method?
   • Does the needed data already exist? If so, how much data is available?
   • What does the data look like?
3. Evaluation: What are you measuring and why?
   • What evaluation metrics do you plan to use to answer your research question?
4. Related work: What previous research has been done on this research question?
   • Give citations to several research papers that you think are relevant along with short explanations of how you think they relate to your project idea. This can be a list with summaries of the papers for now and you will turn it into a proper Related Work section later.
5. Team members: Give a list of the students who will participate in this project, and what contribution you expect each one to make to the project.
6. LLM Use Statement: Describe exactly how you used LLMs to generate parts of your proposal document (refer to the syllabus for guidance). If you did not use any generative text, please state so in this section.

What to Submit

Submit to Blackboard:

• team#-proposal.pdf which is your project proposal. To make grading easier, your proposal should include section headers corresponding to each of the bulleted points as well.

Grading