2013Q3 Reports: Demo Chair

Sarmad Hussain and Miriam Butt co-chaired the ACL 2013 Demo Track. We received an unexpected high number of submissions (64 in total) and ended up accepting 34 of those (acceptance rate of 53%). We had a program committee of 24 and this meant that we were only able to have each of the submissions reviewed by 2 persons. For evaluation criteria, we based ourselves on the criteria developed and reported on in the previous year (2012).

We had some discussion with authors about the anonymity requirement and adjusted our call to only require anonymization within reason (i.e., no renting of outside servers, etc.). Most authors managed to comply with this requirement quite well, though several pointed out that with the demo session, often it was next to impossible to ensure true anonymity.

One thing both of us co-chairs found very confusing is the mode of proceeding. We have both organized numerous conferences and workshops, but were somehow under informed as to specific ACL ways of proceeding (i.e., that softconf should be used for sure for publication compatibility, when and how the proceedings should be published). In the future, it would be good if clearer guidelines could be made available to the chairs (all we basically had to go on was the report from 2012).