Call for System Demonstrations
The EMNLP 2019 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 would like to encourage demonstrations of industrial systems as long as they prove 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 in the conference call for papers.
Accepted submissions will be published in a companion volume of the EMNLP 2019 conference proceedings. We expect at least one of the authors to present a live demo during a demo session at EMNLP 2019, with an accompanying poster.
Submission and reviewing
All submissions should be made electronically via START.
Submissions may consist of 6 pages (including references). Papers must conform to the official EMNLP guidelines which are contained in the LaTeX style files and the Word template. Submissions will be electronic in PDF format through the START conference management system.
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. In contrast to the main session, concurrent posting of demo submissions to arXiv is admissible.
Best Demo Award
EMNLP 2019 will have a Best Demo Award for the first time, honoring a system demonstration that brings together conceptual innovation and practical usability, and encouraging researchers to make their code publicly available in the form of an effective, easy-to-use, runnable system.
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. It is required that each submission includes at least one of the following two items:
1) a link to a website that hosts or demonstrates the system; 2) a short (~2 minute) screencast video demonstrating the system. In addition, we encourage the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. However, there will be a place on the START website to upload additional material, if needed.
It is strongly encouraged that you submit a screencast. This screencast will be used to evaluate the paper, but won’t be published unless requested.
A screencast with audio narration is a natural choice for demos which can be presented on a screen. Otherwise, a video of a user interacting with the system can be used (see this video demonstrating the sounding board system as an example).
The production quality of the video is not of interest. Hence, we encourage the videos to be simply a screencast of the software that is getting demoed, with zero to minimal editing efforts.
We recommend that you publish your video to YouTube or another website and include the link in your paper. If you prefer not to publicly upload a screencast, please submit the video (in MPEG4 format). The video must be included as supplementary material when you submit your paper through the START website.
Technical support that will be provided in the demo session
The organizers will provide a monitor, internet access, and electric outlets. International visitors may need to bring an adaptor (details on the voltage range and plug type used in Hong Kong can be found here). Most demos are presented using a laptop, but some demos may use different types of computers (e.g., smartphones or embedded systems). Unfortunately, the organizers will not be able to provide laptops.
Important Dates
| Submissions due | Monday | |
| Notification of acceptance | Monday | |
| Camera-ready due | Friday | August 30, 2019 |
| Main conference | Tuesday–Thursday | November 5–7, 2019 |
Note. All deadlines are calculated at 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Savings Time (UTC -7h).
Organizers
Demonstration Chairs
Ruihong Huang, Texas A&M University
Sebastian Pado, University of Stuttgart