SOP for MS in CS with Text Minining, Information Retreival, NLP focus

Problems of finding meaning out of large sets of data are of prime interest to me. I am especially interested in open-ended problems in the field of Text Mining social networks and Information Retrieval from the resulting datasets. This is a field that is seeing exponential increase of information overload; at the same time this is also where more and more interaction is taking place every day. This makes it increasingly complex to glean meaning out of these social sources of big data. I plan to work on how to make information from social networks and other communication medium easily inferable. To achieve this, I must gather deeper insight in the field of Data Mining and Information Retrieval. A Masters in Computer Science guided by accomplished professors will help me narrow down my specific research areas and use it to work on more real-world big data challenges. For this purpose I have applied to XXXXXX.

For me, this Masters course shall be a step towards my PhD degree, in which I hope to research the field of Text Mining and Information Retrieval more closely, which in turn shall be another step in the direction of my intended career in academic research. Academic world has always attracted me for the sheer amount of meaningful research it produces and also for the fact that it provides unparalleled scope for independent research.

My undergraduate courses and projects at XXXXX helped me explore the field in a broad manner and has provided me with prerequisites like computing skills and commitment for research. The courses that interested me most are computing, data science and artificial intelligence related: Data Structure, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Compiler Design, Distributed Computing, Discrete Mathematics, Database Systems, Data Mining & Warehousing, Artificial Intelligence. And XXXXXX has courses on - Big Data, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Natural Languages Processing Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence, which shall be a natural extension to my undergraduate education in the field and shall build up on my knowledge and work experience in this field which I shall discuss henceforth.

I went to System Software Lab at XXXXXX for my summer research internship which was sponsored by Ministry of Human Resource (Govt. of India). There, I worked on Text Mining and Information Retrieval from Twitter public timeline. I developed a system that retrieves tweets in real time and returns only those tweets that match a given search-keyword or its synonyms. I began with lemmatising the search-keyword and fetching its synonymous from the lexicon and saved them int a set WordSet. The system also lemmatises words present in a tweet. When a lemmatised word, from a tweet, matches with a word in the WordSet, the tweet is marked as relevant. This is an improvement over Twitter's standard search feature which matches the exact keywords, but completely ignores tweets having its synonyms. I achieved 65% accuracy rate using WordNet as lexicon. While this was an acceptable result, to achieve better accuracy I realised the need for having further knowledge in the field of pattern matching and machine learning. While reading published literature during this work, I came across one which had explored how to use status updates to predict the sentiment of a social network. This motivated me to explore the area of sentiment analysis.

After returning to college I extended internship project to include a keyword classifier as a simple approach towards sentiment analysis. The system decided whether a set of tweets has a negative, positive or neutral sentiment. I achieved this using number of keywords of a particular sentiment present in the tweet and other factors like presence of a smiley. I reused lemmatisation to utilize the sentiment corpus effectively. Working on this project I realised I needed to delve deeper in this field to understand the nuances of sentiment analysis. Deep knowledge of classifiers like Naive Bias Classifier, Decision Tree Learning, Support Vector and Maximum Entropy is required to increase the relevance and accuracy of sentiment analysis of a given data set. This also motivated me to look at this field from a practical point of view, as in, how it can be used in real life problems and realised this portion of research in this field is highly under-represented.

Mobile computing was the burgeoning area when I finished college. I joined XXXXX as an XXX engineer. At XXXX, I worked on a text based command and query system which accepts text commands in natural language and generates relevant actions in the appropriate phone application. For example: "Tell my mother I'll be late for dinner", sends a message to phone user's mother with the body "late for dinner". I implemented Semantic Relationship Extraction of this system which found the related phone applications based on the keywords in the input, classifying different keywords of the input text as content words and functions words. I achieved this using pattern matching in a graph of content words (e.g. "picture", "email") as vertices and the edges being denoted by actions(e.g. "send", "display"), where edges map to relationships. This project gave me an opportunity to work on, and helped me grasp, the basics of natural language processing and pattern matching. I also realised that this field aligns with my research interest in information retrieval, so further academic research in this field will be the next logical step in my career.

Outside academics and work, I have always been active in extra curricular activities. I captained my departmental Cricket team in college, and I currently play for XXXX. During college, I was also associated with an NGO XXXXX where we taught children, from financially weak families, whose parents couldn't afford to send them to a regular school. Twice a week, I took Math and English classes with those children. That is where I realised how fulfilling teaching can be. Later on, I, along with some of my batch mates, organised tutorial classes for department juniors to help them with coding concepts.

I was also very active in quiz competitions. I won first prizes in my college and represented the same in other colleges. Being a seasoned traveller, I have trekked some well known and arduous routes like 'Doodh Sagar Rain trek' and the two and half day trek 'Green Route trek' in the Western Ghats; the latter is arguably one of the most scenic routes on the planet Earth. Such activities helped me in building my character and personality in a holistic manner. I learned how to be resilient even in hostile of situations and how perseverance and patience are the keys to achieving anything of value.

XXXXXXX has the best Computer Science department in XXXXXX and arguably one of the top few in the world. The courses in XXXXXX course match well with my research interest. Also, looking at Prof. XXXXXXX's XXXXX research group I find some of the ongoing research of my interest, especially the proposed work by Dr XXXXXXX "XXXXXXXXX". This is very much related to my Masters thesis proposal "XXXXXXXXXXXX" in the sense that both the proposed projects aim to get information out of collective data of social networks. Also, noting his research focus on "XXXXXXXXX" I find this team and group to be a great match for my research interests, and given a chance to be part of this group I hope to contribute to the work currently going on.

I believe I'll be able to do justice to the opportunity given to me as an XXXXXX Masters scholar and add value to your esteemed department via skills and expertise gained trough my excellent Information Technology undergraduate studies and my R&D work experience with the world's leading XXXXXX organisation.

Thank you very much for considering my application.

- Please help me trim it! Should I make projects less descriptive or maybe remove technical details or "how"? Should I remove one or two (I've total three and I think they are very much related to my area of interest; besides I do not want to skip on my hard work :( )

- Do I need a "hook"? I've failed after trying for weeks. Couldn't come up with a hook.
- Is there any section I should try or start differently? Especially the first or second.
- How is the overall flow? Do I need to rearrange/remove sections?
- Is any section inappropriately written?
- Seems I am reiterating my interest "Data Mining and Information Retrieval" a lot. Is it fine or I should rather say "field" after once or twice?

- Have I used '' or "" or () somewhere inappropriately or am I missing them somewhere?
- What about sentence formation and overall feel of grammar and control over language?

I beleive in this is the definition about SOP which I found in one of the websites;
the statement of purpose, in the eyes of Department Heads, Program Chairs, and Admissions Committee members, can be the most important document in the application. Other parts of your graduate-school application - test scores, transcripts, letters of recommendation, writing samples - do not say as much about you as a person as the statement of purpose can: your proudest accomplishments alongside your fondest hopes and dream

So, in my view it should tell them your background, how your interest in the field developed, what you did to pursue your interest, your future goals and how this program help you achieve those goals.

I feel this SOP is not in line with this structure.

Thank you for the remark. I agree with you and that's why I felt apprehensive that this SOP feels almost a mechanical read. I am struggling to bring some personal touch. The fact that I don't have much time for three of my applications makes it worse.

Could you please give your feedback on what parts are almost unnecessary and should be omitted?

> tell them your background

> how your interest in the field developed, what you did to pursue your interest
I've three full paragraphs for work experience in the field. I did it because I thought I might fail to make it clear to the admission's committee what my work was or that I might miss the slightest technical details I could include in the SOP. Should I just mention the work in very short sentences and rather focus on how this shaped my desire to do the masters.

> your future goals
In short I've mentioned this in second paragraph. Should I include more or should I rather place that paragraph later?

> how this program help you achieve those goals
You mean it's not there in my SOP at all or it's there (in third last paragraph in my opinion) but it should be just after where I state what I want to do in future, which I've included in second paragraph and in each work experience paragraph.

I've average grades in first three semester but very good and excellent in next 5 semesters. Overall very good. I also have 2 years gap between my 10+2 (plus, I just had 72% here) and my UG. Most universities don't even ask for anything before UG. But one universities have mentioned "Applicants needs to include a CV without any biographical gaps since senior secondary". Does that mean I talk about these shortcomings in my SOP or should I leave it?

Am I being verbose or too verbose?

HOOK is something I am not able to come up with. I tried but I was not satisfied. I came up with few but then my SOP was becoming even longer - I needed to accommodate that hook with supporting line. So, I decided to leave it at that. Is that alright? Or should keep at the expense of my work experience description, about which I have asked you above?

I'll rewrite the SOP and post it here in the comments. It will kind of you if you could give some feedback on this questions or some pointers from the SOP.

This has some relevance to what I mentioned because it tends to express your passion. However, tell them how it all started and made influenced you to nurture that passion. Then cut down on too much details with regard to your work experience. That may bore them rather than impressing them. You have got other places to talk about them in detail.


This is something you should elaborate more on. They would want to know what you intend to do in future and how this program will assist you in doing so. This is one of the very important aspects of SOP for which you may not get much opportunity to talk about in other parts of your application.