Call for System Demonstrations

The ACL 2020 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 additionally strongly encourage demonstrations of industrial systems that are 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. 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

Accepted submissions will be published in a companion volume of the ACL 2020 conference proceedings.

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

As in previous years, ACL 2020's demo track will feature a Best Demo Award. We hope to encourage researchers to make their code publicly available and in the form of an easy-to-use, runnable system.


Important Dates

- Paper submission deadline: Jan 31th, 2020
- Notification of acceptance: Apr 3rd, 2020
- Camera-ready submission: Apr 24th, 2020

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h ("anywhere on Earth")


Demo Details

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. Authors will also be able to upload and submit 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 paper submission.

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


Demo Submission

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system at https://www.softconf.com/acl2020/demos.

Style files should meet the requirements of the ACL main conference. Submissions may consist of up to 6 pages, plus unlimited references. Submissions must conform to the ACL 2020 official style guidelines (https://acl2020.org/calls/papers/) and they must be in PDF format. The submissions have to be original work (unpublished), as the publication in ACL will be archival.


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.


Demo co-chairs:

Asli Celikyilmaz (Microsoft Research)
Shawn (Tsung-Hsien) Wen (PolyAI)Call for System Demonstrations