Conclusion & Abstract

1. Conclusion & Abstract RESEARCH METHOD FOR ACADEMIC PROJECT I

2. Conclusion • The main purpose of “Conclusion Chapter” is to show how you have attempted to fill the gap on knowledge that was identified earlier and to clarify to what extent the study has been successful. • Four basic steps to take in writing Conclusion: • Summarize your research • Spell out your contribution • State the limitations of your study • Suggest potential areas of further research

3. Task 1: Read through the following conclusion from an article “An ensemble approach for semantic assessment of summary writings” and identify the four different steps. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, we propose an ensemble approach which integrates two of the most effective assessment techniques of LSA and n-gram co-occurrence into an efficient technique for automatic summary assessment. Performance comparison between the proposed ensemble approach with other existing techniques has also been conducted. The proposed approach has achieved an overall accuracy of 96% as compared to the best existing technique, BLEU, which has an overall accuracy of 87%. For future work, as the techniques used and proposed in this paper are mainly based on latent semantic analysis or machine translation based evaluation techniques, we will investigate the effectiveness of using machine learning or statistical approaches for the assessment of summary writings. In addition, as our current approach only focuses on semantic assessment of contents, we also intend to develop a complete summary assessment system by incorporating an English language assessor and style checker.

4. abstract • The abstract is the last section of a thesis to be written. • It is written after the research has been completed. • It provides the reader with a summary of the contents of the thesis. • It is generally one of the first a reader will look at and therefore it is important that the Abstract gives the reader a good initial impression.

5. An abstract should ideally present these information, following the order in which the information is presented in the thesis: • The purpose/objectives of the research • The reasons/justifications why the research was carried out. • The research method/techniques employed. • The mains results and conclusion. • Recommendation

6. Task 2: Look at the abstract below, which is taken form an article “An ensemble approach for semantic assessment of summary writings”, and identify the information 1 – 5. Computer-assisted assessment of summary writings is a challenging area which has recently attracted much interest from the research community. This is mainly due to the advances in other areas such as information extraction and natural language processing which have made automatic summary assessment possible. Different techniques such as Latent Semantic Analysis, n-gram co-occurrence and BLEU have been proposed for automatic evaluation of summaries. However, these techniques are unable to achieve good performance. In this paper, we propose an ensemble approach, that integrates two of the most effective summary evaluation techniques, LSA and n-gram co-occurrence, for improving the accuracy of automatic summary assessment. The performance of the proposed ensemble approach has shown that it is able to achieve high accuracy and improve the performance quite substantially compared with other existing techniques.

7. Length • The length of an abstract of a thesis is usually around 200 – 500 words. • It must include all the essential points with no redundant words or expressions.

8. Tense • Approach 1: which sees the abstract as a description of the thesis itself, i.e., the document that the abstract is summarising – present tense. • Approach 2: which sees an abstract as a summary of the research that is reported in that document – both present simple and past simple tenses. • The present is used for stating the purpose and for presenting the conclusions recommendations • The past is used to describe the method used and to present the individual findings.

9. Structure of the thesis • Title Page • Abstract • Acknowledgement • Table of Content • List of Figures & Tables • Main Text • References • Appendices

10. FORMAT OF THE REPORT • TITLE The title must be the title of research which has been approved by the Supervisor. • ABSTRACT (a) Not more than 500 words (b) Written in English or Bahasa Malaysia (based on the language chosen for the report writing) • BINDING / SUBMISSION Copy for final submission (to the office): (a) Academic Project I - One (1) printed copy of your report using ring binding (b) Academic Project II - One (1) printed copy of your report using ring binding - One (1) softcopy of your report (in PDF or WORD format) - One (1) softcopy of your system These 2 can be combined into 1 CD

11. MAXIMUM LENGTH 20,000 words (Excluding footnote, appendices, tables, diagrams, references and bibliography) • PRINTING QUALITY (a) 1.5 lines -spacing for all sections. Single-spacing can be used for footnote, appendices, tables and diagrams. (b) Font type: Times New Roman and Equation Editor for mathematical text. (c) Font size 12 for all text and font size 8 for footnotes. • INDENT   The indents of pages are as follows: • Top : 2.0 cm • Right : 2.0 cm • Left : 4.0 cm • Bottom : 2.0 cm

12. PAGE NUMBERING (a) Font size 8 is recommended for page numbering. (b) All page numbers should be printed 1.0 cm from the bottom margin and placed on the right-hand side; (c) Roman numerals (i, ii, iii etc) should be used in the Preface section; (d) The Title Page and the first page of the Preface should not be numbered. Numbering begins on the second page with ‘ii’. • REFERENCES APA style. Format references – please refer to the APA guideline: http://www.ips.um.edu.my/images/ips/doc/download/APA-Guide.pdf

13. Academic Project I ScheduleSemester II 2011/2012

14. GOOD LUCK!