Formalities
This seminar is suitable for MSc and advanced BSc students of computational linguistics. For Coli BSc students, it counts as a Hauptseminar; for everyone else, it counts as a seminar. The language for talks and discussions will be English if any non-German-speakers participate; you may write your seminar paper in either English or German. Every student in the seminar must give a talk to get credit. You may then acquire additional credit points by writing a seminar paper and/or passing an oral exam.
The usual rules for credit points apply (T = talk; SP = seminar paper):
| Degree | credit points |
| B.Sc. (before WS 2006) | 9 (T + SP) |
| B.Sc. (WS 2006 and later) | 7 (T + SP) |
| M.Sc. (before WS 2006) | 4 (T), 9 (T + SP) |
| M.Sc. (WS 2006 and later) | 4 (T), 7 (T + SP) |
| Diplom | 2 (T), 4 (T + SP) |
In general, a talk should take about one hour, and will typically cover one long or two shorter papers. Seminar papers should summarize the paper(s) that you presented in your talks and add some thoughts of your own. These could be a comparison of the two papers, or a sketch of a clever new idea, or an implementation or corpus study. As a consequence, I envisage that papers will be about 15-20 pages in length.
If you write a seminar paper, your grade will be the average of a grade for the talk (50%) and a grade for the seminar paper (50%). Note, however, that the grade for the talk is complex. In particular, I want to encourage you to give your talks in a way that encourages discussions afterwards. This is why I will take into account both how lively and interesting the discussion after your talk was, and how much you contributed to the discussions after other people's talks.