When you write report for your MTP, DDP or BTP, please keep the following guidelines in mind. Before writing the report, please send the content outline including subsection level headings to your guides and get an approval from them.

Overleaf template link for report: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/iit-bombay-phd-thesis-template/mppfryyshcjr

Common points

• Problem definition, motivation and conclusions are extremely important

• Draw strong and definite conclusions. What have you learnt from the research?

• Cite completely and correctly - acknowledge any example, table, figure you have drawn from anywhere

• Avoid plagiarism - Your report must be in your own words

• Conclusions are different from summary

• Insightful analysis of results, error analysis, confusion matrix, case studies are a must

• Avoid writing in first and second person as they undermine author’s objectivity. Use third person

• Be concise

Report writing

• Imagine If someone had to continue your work by reading your report, how can you help them? The idea is that people who are unfamiliar with the subject can find everything they need to know from a good report

A report is designed to lead people through the information in a structured way, but also to enable them to find the information that they want quickly and easily.

• A chapter on data preparation and annotation is a must

• Visit and re-visit your abstracts: they should not be very long and general. Have to give your OWN contribution

• Every chapter must have a summary

• All literature survey should be on one place, not distributed everywhere.

• References must be linked in the body

• A roadmap of the whole report in the first chapter is a must. The relevance of each chapter must be established

• Thesis approval sheet must be there at the start of the report

• A roadmap of each section in the beginning of each chapter is a must. The relevance of each section must be established

• All non Roman strings should be in 4 forms (see my book)

• Lit survey should be such that it will be like a survey paper. This will be uploaded on CFILT home page.

• The dataset information (dataset used as well as important datasets read about) should be there in the survey paper, so chapter 1, 2, 3 along with the dataset chapter of the final MTP/DDP report shall go in the survey paper.

• In the final MTP/DDP report there should be a chapter named Model, it should begin with mathematical modelling (argmax expression) and than go into the deep learning models used.

• The report cannot be a bound volume of your papers.

Presentation guidelines

• If you have X mins to present you should have roughly X slides prepared. You can have another 20-30 slides in the background as reference material for Q&A.

• Don’t read from the slides. Text on the slides should be concise bullet points. What you speak on that slide should be explanations.

• Presentation should be like a story where each slide connects to the next.

• Practice doing the presentation at least 3-4 times before the actual one. This is to make sure you complete on time and your final presentation is smooth.

• Every word you write on the slides and every word you say should mean anything. Don’t say anything that is not important. Being concise is essential.

• Speak passionately about your work. Keep a smile and have energy.

• Share presentation with guide at least 2 days before to get feedback

Other things to keep in mind

Bare essential

1. No grammatical mistakes. Use tools like grammarly for quick error correction.
   1. Read this article on how to use punctuations: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/punctuation/
   2. No gap before punctuation
   3. Gap before parenthesis
   4. Singular plural
   5. Subject verb agreement

2. Impeccable formatting
   1. Uniform font
   2. Use section and subsection numbers
   3. Uniform gap for section titles and lines (else looks very unpolished)
   4. Figures and tables numbered as Ch.no and properly captioned
   5. References in ACM or IEEE or ACL order, complete and correct

3. Never use contractions (’do not’ instead of ‘don’t’)

4. Use equations editor and not cut and paste from pdf

5. Acknowledgement in formal expressions

6. Never start a chapter straightway with section, and section with subsection. Use few lines or one paragraph to brief the reader.

7. A proper lit survey chapter, but not scattered

8. Add a page listing own publications

9. Multilingual strings must be in 4 forms: the string, transliteration, gloss and English translation

10. The report should look like a report and not a compendium of slides

Good to have

1. Abstract: describing what you want to do

2. Conclusion: describing how much of the above has been done

3. Future work: putting down (abstract-conclusion)'s quantum of work

4. Proof read many times

Great to have

1. Build a story

2. Present it coherently, interestingly

3. Get it reviewed by few people before submitting