Call for Demos

The 46th Annual meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

http://www.acl2008.org/

June 15-20, 2008
Columbus, Ohio, USA


Demos Chair:
Jimmy Lin
(College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, USA)


The ACL 2008 Program Committee invites proposals for the
Demonstrations Program. We encourage both the exhibition of early
research prototypes and interesting mature systems. Commercial sales
and marketing activities are not appropriate in the Demonstrations
Program, and should be arranged as part of the Exhibit Program.

We invite proposals for two types of demonstrations:

- Type I: theater-style, as part of the regular program

- Type II: poster-style, where demos are to be presented on table tops
in sessions scheduled for a specific time slot.

Areas of Interest
-----------------

The special theme for ACL 2008 is "interfaces for NLP systems". We
especially encourage work that attempts to bridge the fields of
human-computer interaction (HCI) and computational linguistics. Work
of interest includes, but is not limited to:

* User interfaces for monolingual and multilingual information access
systems, including retrieval, summarization, and QA engines
* Dialogue and conversational systems
* Visualization tools
* Tools that assist in the development of other NLP applications
(e.g., error analysis)

In addition, proposals for demonstrations of software related to any
aspect of computational linguistics are solicited. Areas of interest
include, but are not limited to:

* End-to-end natural language processing systems
* Applications using embedded language technology components
* Reusable components (parsers, generators, speech recognizers, etc.)
* Software tools for facilitating computational linguistics research
* Software for evaluating natural language systems and components
* Aids for teaching computational linguistics concepts


Format for Submission
---------------------

Demo proposals consist of the following parts, which should all be
sent to the Demo Chair. Please use the main ACL paper formatting
guidelines.

* An extended abstract of the technical content to be demonstrated,
including title, authors, full contact information, references, and
acknowledgements. Please indicate a Type I or Type II demo.

* A "script outline" of the demo presentation, including accompanying
narrative, and either a Web address for accessing the demo or visual
aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams).

* A detailed description of hardware and software requirements
expected to be provided by the local organizer.

The entire proposal should not be more than four pages.

Submissions Procedure
---------------------

Proposals should be submitted by March 14, 2008 to the ACL 2008
Demonstrations Chair. Submissions must be received electronically.
Please submit your proposals and any inquiries to:

Jimmy Lin
College of Information Studies
University of Maryland
jimmylin -at- umd .dot. edu

Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their relevance to
computational linguistics, innovation, scientific contribution,
presentation, as well as potential logistical constraints.

Accepted submissions will be allocated four pages in the Companion
Volume to the Proceedings of the Conference.

Important Dates
---------------

Proposal submission deadline: March 14, 2008
Notification of acceptance: Apr 14, 2008
Camera ready copies due: Apr 21, 2008
ACL-07 Conference: June 15-20, 2008