2016Q3 Reports: Demonstration Chairs

Sameer Pradhan and Marianna Apidianaki co-chaired the system demonstrations session at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The system demonstrations program offers the presentation of early research prototypes as well as interesting mature systems. Each demonstration paper consists of 6 pages (including references).

We received 85 submissions which is the highest number of submissions to an ACL system demonstrations session to date. From these, 28 were selected for inclusion in the program (acceptance rate of 33%) after review by three members of the program committee. The program committee was composed of 77 members and each reviewer was allocated at most 4 papers. The evaluation criteria were similar to the ones used for regular papers but we insisted on the importance of taking submitted supporting material into account.

A novelty of this year’s system demonstrations session is that reviewing was single-blind. The issue of demo anonymization had been pointed out in previous years, as the supplied demonstration links often revealed the identity of the authors. This year the authors did not need to conceal their identity. They could include their name and affiliation in the papers, self-references were also allowed. This new policy was made explicit in the reviewing guidelines.