Call For System Demonstrations

The ACL 2017 System Demonstration Program Committee invites proposals for the Demonstrations Program. Submissions may range from early research prototypes to mature production-ready systems. Of particular interest are publicly available open-source or open-access systems. We would like to strongly encourage demonstrations of industrial systems as long as they prove technologically innovative given the current state of the art of theory and applied research in computational linguistics.

Areas of interest include all topics related to theoretical and applied computational linguistics, such as (but not limited to) the topics listed on the main conference website.

Accepted submissions will be published in a companion volume of the ACL 2017 conference proceedings, and will be presented during two demo sessions along with accompanying posters.

Please note: Commercial sales and marketing activities are not appropriate in the Demonstrations Program and should be arranged as part of the Exhibit Program.

Best Demo Award

This year we will also award a Best Demo Award! This will encourage researchers to make their code publicly available and in the form of an end-to-end runnable system.

Important Dates

Submission DeadlineWednesdayMarch 1, 2017
Notification of AcceptanceWednesdayApril 5, 2017
Camera Ready DueSaturdayApril 22, 2017
Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM GMT -12 (anywhere in the world).
Changed from Pacific Standard Time, an extra 4 hours!

General Notes

Submitted systems may be of the following types:

  • Natural Language Processing systems or system components
  • Application systems using language technology components
  • Software tools for computational linguistics research
  • Software for demonstration or evaluation
  • Software supporting learning or education
  • Tools for data visualization and annotation
  • Development tools

Developers should outline the design of their system and provide sufficient details to allow the evaluation of its validity, quality, and relevance to computational linguistics. Pointers to web sites running a demo preview will also be helpful. For non web-based demos, it is possible to submit a short (~2 minute) screencast video demonstrating the system. This screencast will be used to evaluate the paper, but won’t be published unless requested. We encourage the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. However, there will be place on the START website to upload additional material, if needed. If you choose to submit a screencast, please upload the video to some hosting site (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) and include the link in your submission.

Demo submissions should also clearly indicate if any computer equipment is expected to be provided by the local organizer. If so, please specify desired hardware platform, hard disk and memory capacity, operating system and other software needed in order to run the demo.

Demo Submission and Templates

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system at https://www.softconf.com/acl2017/demos/.

Submissions may consist of 6 pages (including references). We strongly recommend the use of the official ACL 2017 style templates:

Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in these templates, and they must be in PDF format.

Reviewing Policy

Reviewing will be single-blind, so authors do not need to conceal their identity. The paper should include the authors’ names and affiliations. Self-references are also allowed.

Contact Information