ACL-2000 Demonstrations (Norbert Reithinger)
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ACL 2000 Demonstrations Chairman Report

Norbert Reithinger

DFKI GmbH
Saarbruecken, Germany
bert@dfki.de

One intention for this year's ACL demos was to have interesting demos
that are especially linked to the thematic sessions of the main
conference. In the initial Call for Demos, which was posted on various
mailing lists and the ACL 2000 conference site at the beginning of May
2000, we called especially for submissions in the 4 areas. The session
chairs of all 4 sessions agreed to take over the review process for
these demos.

We got 26 submissions, and accepted 18, one of which was later
withdrawn. Sorted according to the submitter's country, we get the
following table

		  Sub.	   Accepted
Asia:		  11	   7

	PR China: 5	   4
	Japan:	  2	   1
	Korea:	  4	   2

	
America:	  5	   4

 	Canada:	  1	   1
	USA:	  4	   3


Europe:		   10	   6

	Czech Rep: 3	   2
	Germany:   3	   3
	Denmark:   1	   1
	Portugal:  1	   0
	Spain:	   1	   1 (later withdrawn)
	Switzerl.: 1	   0
	
Eight of the accepted demos are related to the thematic session T4
"Theoretical and technical approaches for Asian language processing".
Two of these eight were also submitted to T2 "Machine learning and
statistical NLP for dialog" and one of these eight to T3 "Text
summarization". The rest was in the category "General". If future ACLs
will also have thematic sessions, I propose that the thematic session
chairs ask paper submitters also to submit demos.

A problem in the preparation of the demos is the technical
infrastructure the demoers assume, e.g. Internet connections, or
beamers and screens. In the call we stated that we cannot guarantee
anything but power. However, nowadays many systems process data off the
Internet and need connectivity. Also, the expectations of the demoers
wrt. the local presentation infrastructure are high. This creates
problems for the demo organizer and the local organization, if the
venue is not at an institution where this infrastructure is already
present. Costs for Internet connectivity was within a reasonable range
for this ACL. However, it was too expensive to rent beamers. The local
organizers were very helpful and inventive to provide at least 17"
monitors for notebook presentations.