NAACL HLT 09 Call for Demonstrations


The NAACL HLT 2009 Program Committee invites proposals for the Demonstration Program to be held June 1-3, 2009 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We encourage both the exhibition of early research prototypes and interesting mature systems. Commercial sales and marketing activities are not appropriate in the Demonstration 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


Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following types of systems, some of which have been demonstrated at recent ACL conferences:

  • End-to-end natural language processing systems
  • User interfaces for monolingual and multilingual information access systems, including retrieval, summarization, and QA engines
  • Voice search interfaces
  • Dialogue and conversational systems
  • Multimodal systems utilizing language technology
  • Language technology on mobile devices
  • Applications using embedded language technology components
  • Meeting capture and analysis systems utilizing language technology
  • Natural language processing systems for medical informatics
  • Assistive applications of language technology
  • Visualization tools
  • Software for evaluating natural language systems and components
  • Aids for teaching computational linguistics concepts
  • Software tools for facilitating computational linguistics research Reusable components (parsers, generators, speech recognizers, etc.)
  • Tools that assist in the development of other NLP applications (e.g., error analysis)

Format for Submission


Demo proposals consist of the following parts, which should all be sent to the Demonstration Co-Chairs. Please use the main ACL paper formatting guidelines. Please note that no hardware or software will be provided by the local organizer.

  • 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).

    • The entire proposal must not be more than four pages.


    Submissions Procedure


    Proposals must be submitted by February 9, 2009 to the Demonstration Co-Chairs. Submissions must be received electronically. Please submit your proposals and any inquiries to:


    Michael JohnstonFred Popowich
    AT&TSimon Fraser University
    johnston "at" research "dot" att "dot" com popowich "at" sfu "dot" ca

    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.


    Further Details


    Further details on the date, time, and format of the demonstration session(s) will be determined and provided at a later date. Please send any inquiries to the demonstration co-chairs at the email addresses listed above.


    Important Dates


    February 9, 2009Submission deadline
    March 27, 2009Notification of acceptance
    April 6, 2009Submission of final demo related literature
    June 1-3, 2009Conference

    All submissions or camera-ready copies are due by 11:59pm EST on the dates specified above.