The ACL 2008 Program Committee invites proposals for the Demonstrations Program. We encourage both the exhibition of early research prototypes and interesting mature systems. Commercial sales and marketing activities are not appropriate in the Demonstrations Program, and should be arranged as part of the Exhibit Program. We invite proposals for two types of demonstrations:

- Type I: theater-style, as part of the regular program

- Type II: poster-style, where demos are to be presented on table tops in sessions scheduled for a specific time slot.

Areas of Interest

The special theme for ACL 2008 is "interfaces for NLP systems". We especially encourage work that attempts to bridge the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computational linguistics. Work of interest includes, but is not limited to:

• User interfaces for monolingual and multilingual information access systems, including retrieval, summarization, and QA engines
• Dialogue and conversational systems
• Visualization tools
• Tools that assist in the development of other NLP applications (e.g., error analysis)

In addition, proposals for demonstrations of software related to any aspect of computational linguistics are solicited. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• End-to-end natural language processing systems
• Applications using embedded language technology components
• Reusable components (parsers, generators, speech recognizers, etc.)
• Software tools for facilitating computational linguistics research
• Software for evaluating natural language systems and components
• Aids for teaching computational linguistics concepts

Format for Submission

Demo proposals consist of the following parts, which should all be sent to the Demo Chair. Please use the main ACL paper formatting guidelines.

• An extended abstract of the technical content to be demonstrated, including title, authors, full contact information, references, and acknowledgements. Please indicate a Type I or Type II demo.
• A "script outline" of the demo presentation, including accompanying narrative, and either a Web address for accessing the demo or visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams).
• A detailed description of hardware and software requirements expected to be provided by the local organizer.

The entire proposal should not be more than four pages.

Submissions Procedure

Proposals should be submitted by March 14, 2008 to the ACL 2008 Demonstrations Chair. Submissions must be received electronically. Please submit your proposals and any inquiries to:

Jimmy Lin

College of Information Studies

University of Maryland

Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their relevance to computational linguistics, innovation, scientific contribution, presentation, as well as potential logistical constraints.

Accepted submissions will be allocated four pages in the Companion Volume to the Proceedings of the Conference.