Thesis Checklist

Introduction

  • The topic is clearly introduced and motivated.
  • The goal of the research performed in this thesis is clear; ideally by stating research questions or hypotheses.

Background

  • I provided all information that is required such that another student of the same program would be able to understand the thesis without additional literature.
  • Sufficient information on related methods is provided such that the decision process which lead to the actual choice of methods is understandable.

Related Work

  • All work has been described which constitutes are starting point for my own work.

Methods

  • The conceptual and implementation level are clearly separated (don’t mix code snippets with mathematical explanations). Typically, implementation details are not required, if you want to write about them, make a section “Implementation Details”.
  • It is clearly understandable what my own methods are, and where I ‘just’ reused what others prepared.

Experiments/Results/Discussion

  • The experiments are designed to answer the research questions. Every experiment is clearly explained.
  • Tables and results are prepared such that the reader can easily understand how they help to get an answer to a research question.
  • A reader would be able to repeat all experiments by themselves with the available information.
  • The reader is not left alone with interpreting the results. I talk them through each table and depiction with text.

Bibliography

  • Every entry is complete; all information is available and it is easy for a reader to understand to which source an entry corresponds.
  • ArXiv papers (and similar) are only cited if there is no published version of the paper (e.g. in ACL Anthology) available.
  • All entries are consistent; author’s first names are always (or never) abbreviated; abbreviation always have a ‘.’ behind them (or never), conferences are called what they are called in the official publication (and always the same; but that might change from year to year), journals have numbers and volumes; page numbers are included when available.

Conclusion

  • I answer the research questions posed in the introduction.
  • I summarize the main take home messages

General

  • All abbreviations are introduced.
  • Abbreviations are avoided if not used really very frequently.
  • All work that has been used is cited.
  • Where somebody’s work has been used to write some text, it is mentioned.
  • I really checked carefully that I cite peer-reviewed (quality assured) work, I avoided to use blog post or Wikipedia as much as possible (because they can be of questionable quality, because they are not reviewed).
  • Sections of the same kind are of similar length/degree of detailness (e.g., if SVMs and NN have been used, both received the same attention)
  • I checked that I am allowed to re-use depictions (with citations); otherwise I have redrawn them and cited the original source.
  • I checked the book https://epubs.siam.org/doi/book/10.1137/1.9781611976106 (accessible for free from the university network) and the way how I write. Particularly relevant are Section 1, 2, 3, and 5.