Undergraduate Research

We are committed to fostering undergraduate research and have been fortunate to welcome many undergraduate scholars into our lab. To apply for our lab, please carefully review the following information:

Prerequisite

The cornerstone of your undergraduate education is building a strong foundation in your major. If you are majoring in Computer Science or QTM-Informatics, you must have completed CS253: Data Structures and Algorithms as a minimum requirement to apply to our lab. If you are majoring in a field outside of these majors, such as Linguistics, please contact us using the form below.

Before Applying to Emory NLP

Before submitting your application, take the time to familiarize yourself with our research focus. Our project pages and recent publications will provide you with insights into our past and current work. Once you have a good understanding of our projects, select one that aligns with your interests. We highly recommend reading our recent papers related to your chosen area of interest. This will help you determine the background knowledge you need to engage in that specific research.

Applying to Emory NLP

Once you have conducted your research about our lab and are ready to apply, please use the form provided below to submit your application.

Internship

All undergraduate applicants to our lab are required to complete an internship. The internship serves two main purposes:

1. Familiarization: During this period, you will gain a deeper understanding of our ongoing research, develop foundational skills in NLP, and actively participate in lab activities.
2. Evaluation: We will assess your dedication to NLP research and your compatibility with our lab during this internship phase.

Typically lasting about a semester, the internship involves the following activities (in parallel):

1) Attending our Seminar Series

While not mandatory, we strongly encourage you to attend our weekly seminar series. It is open to the public and provides insights into the current work of our lab members. Attendance is a requirement for all lab members, and the schedule can be found on our seminar page.

2) Foundational Studying in NLP

We will provide you with specific foundational papers to read to prepare you for NLP research. These papers include:

• Attention is All You Need, Vaswani et al., Proceedings of the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NeurIPS), 2017.
• BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding, Devlin et al., Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2019.

Once you've completed your reading, we will assess your understanding of these papers in-depth. If your comprehension meets our standards, you will receive an official invitation to join the lab. Otherwise, we will encourage you to continue studying and return for another round of assessment. You are always welcome to ask questions during this learning phase, as it may require reading many additional papers based on your background.

3) Annotation

Occasionally, our research projects require dedicated annotation work for study evaluation and analysis. Participation in annotation tasks is voluntary, but it offers a valuable opportunity to contribute to our ongoing research before completing your foundational studies.

After Internship

Upon successful completion of your internship, we will extend an official invitation for you to join our lab. While we encourage all undergraduate students joining our lab to apply for the honors program, which provides additional research time and fulfills a writing requirement, it is not a mandatory requirement for lab membership.