Challenges in Bridging Literature and Computational Linguistics for a Bachelor's Thesis
Analysis
The article describes the predicament of a student in English Literature with a Translation track who aims to connect their research to Computational Linguistics despite limited resources. The student's university lacks courses in Computational Linguistics, forcing self-study of coding and NLP. The constraints of the research paper, limited to literature, translation, or discourse analysis, pose a significant challenge. The student struggles to find a feasible and meaningful research idea that aligns with their interests and the available categories, compounded by a professor's unfamiliarity with the field. This highlights the difficulties faced by students trying to enter emerging interdisciplinary fields with limited institutional support.
Key Takeaways
- •The student's situation highlights the challenges of pursuing interdisciplinary fields without adequate institutional support.
- •The need to connect research to a desired future field while adhering to existing constraints is a common problem.
- •The lack of experienced mentorship in emerging fields can significantly hinder a student's progress.
“I am struggling to narrow down a solid research idea. My professor also mentioned that this field is relatively new and difficult to work on, and to be honest, he does not seem very familiar with computational linguistics himself.”