This journal reflection is designed to integrate with your selection of a final project topic. As you are considering topics, you should be exploring the literature and background available in our textbook in a somewhat shallow way in order to gauge your interest and feasibility of the project before diving in to the project research full-force. Along the way, once you’ve found a topic you believe is suitable, read a paper in more detail and write your reflection on it. You may later decide not to use that topic, which is fine. You may also decide that you really like that topic, in which case this reflection provides you a jump-start on your background research.
If you’re not sure where to start, I would begin by examining the textbook, both the 2nd edition which you have physically, and the 3rd edition draft online. The book is well referenced, with large bibliographies at the end of every chapter. You might also read Wikipedia articles on computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, natural language processing, natural language understanding, and information extraction, and look at the papers they cite. If you’re interested in a cognitive systems based project, you might look at the papers in the Advances in Cognitive Systems journal, ACT-R publications related to language, SOAR publications related to language, and the SNeRG Bibliography. Additionally, if you’re interested in something specific let me know and I can help you find resources for you to examine.