2018Q3 Reports: Demonstration Chairs

Fei Liu, University of Central Florida

Thamar Solorio, University of Houston

The ACL 2018 demonstrations track invites submissions ranging from early research prototypes to mature production-ready systems. We received 79 submissions this year, of which 24 were selected for inclusion in the program (acceptance rate of 30%) after review by three members of the program committee.

We successfully recruited 111 PC members for the demonstrations track. Each PC member is assigned 2 to 3 papers for review, and each paper receives 3 reviews. The two demo chairs then made the accept/reject decisions based on the reviewers' recommendations.

We would like to thank the members of the program committee for their timely help in reviewing the submissions. A subset of the program committee members also helped us in selecting the best demo paper. The candidate papers were selected by the demo chairs based on the feedback received by reviewers. These are the papers nominated for the best demo paper:

• CRUISE: Cold-Start New Skill Development via Iterative Utterance Generation by Yilin Shen, Avik Ray, Abhishek Patel and Hongxia Jin
• Out-of-the-box Universal Romanization Tool by Ulf Hermjakob, Jonathan May and Kevin Knight
• Platforms for Non-Speakers Annotating Names in Any Language by Ying Lin, Cash Costello, Boliang Zhang, Di Lu, Heng Ji, James Mayfield and Paul McNamee
• YEDDA: A lightweight Collaborative Text Span Annotation Tool by Jie Yang, Yue Zhang, Linwei Li and Xingxuan Li

The winner of the best demo paper will be announced at ACL 2018. We would like to thank the best demo paper committee for their dedicated work in this task. Lastly, we thank the many authors that submitted their work to the demonstrations track.

Demonstrations papers will be presented during the three day conference alongside the poster sessions (12:30PM-14:00PM each day on July 16th-18th, 2018).