HLT/EMNLP 2005 Call for Demos

Human Language Technology Conference
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

October 6-8, 2005
Vancouver, B.C., Canada

The HLT/EMNLP 2005 Program Committee invites proposals for the Demonstrations Program. This program is aimed at offering first-hand experience with new systems, providing opportunities to exchange ideas gained from creating systems, and collecting feedback from expert users. It is primarily to encourage the early exhibition of research prototypes, but interesting mature systems are also eligible. Submission of a demonstration proposal on a particular topic does not preclude or require a separate submission of a paper on that topic; it is possible that some but not all of the demonstrations will illustrate concepts that are described in companion papers.

Commercial sales and marketing activities are not appropriate in the demonstrations program, and should be arranged as part of the HLT/EMNLP 2005 Exhibit Program. However, this year, we are introducing a way for companies to sponsor the demonstration program by way of demonstration awards. Interested companies or organizations that wish to make an award for the best demonstration, or that which is most relevant to their roadmap, should contact their demo area chair for more details.

Demo Co-Chairs

Donna Byron, Ohio State University

Anand Venkataraman, SRI International

Dell Zhang, National University of Singapore

Areas of Interest

We encourage the submission of proposals for demonstrations of software and hardware related to all areas of computational linguistics: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR), etc. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, natural language speech and text systems for:

• Speech recognition and generation;
• Speech retrieval and summarization;
• Rich transcription of speech;
• Interactive dialogue;
• Information retrieval, filtering and extraction;
• Document classification, clustering and summarization;
• Language modeling, text mining and question answering;
• Machine translation;
• Multilingual and cross-lingual processing;
• Multimodal user interface;
• Mobile language-enabled devices;
• Tools for Ontology, Lexicon, or other NLP resource development;
• Applications in growing domains (web-search, bioinformatics, ...)

Please be referred to the HLT/EMNLP 2005 CFP for a more detailed but not exhausted list of relevant topics.

Important Dates

Submission

Format

A demo proposal should consist of the following parts:

• An extended abstract of up to two pages, including the title, authors, full contact information, and technical content to be demonstrated. It should give an overview of what the demonstration aimed to achieve, how the demonstration illustrates novel ideas or or late-breaking results, and relation to other systems or projects described in the context of other research (i.e., references to related literature).
• A detailed requirement description of hardware, software and network access expected to be provided by the local organizer. Demonstrators are encouraged to be flexible in their requirements (possibly with different demos for different logistical situations). Please state what you can bring yourself and what you absolutely must have provided. We will do our best to provide equipment and resources but nothing can be guaranteed at this point beyond space and power.
• A concise script outline of the demo presentation, including accompanying narrative, and either a web address for accessing the demo or visual aids (e.g., screen-shots, snapshots, or sketches). The script should be no more than 6 pages.

Demo abstracts must be submitted electronically in either Postscript (PS) or Portable Document Format (PDF). They should follow the same format as the main conference papers. Authors are encouraged to use the style files provided on the HLT/EMNLP 2005 website. We strongly prefer submissions in PS format. It is the responsibility of the authors to ensure that their proposals use no unusual format features and can be printed on a standard Postscript printer.

Demo requirement descriptions and script outlines can be in one of the following formats: PS, PDF, Plain Text, HTML, Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.

Procedure

Demo proposals should be submitted electronically to the demo co-chairs at demos-hlt-emnlp05@speech.sri.com.

Reviewing

Demo proposals will be evaluated on the basis of their relevance to the conference, innovation, scientific contribution, presentation, and user friendliness, as well as potential logistical constraints.

Publication

The accepted demo abstracts will be published in the conference booklet, and probably in the online Proceedings of the HLT/EMNLP 2005 Demonstrations as well.

Further Details

Further details on the timing and format for the demonstration sessions will be determined and provided at a later date. Please send any inquiries to the demo co-chairs at demos-hlt-emnlp05@speech.sri.com.

Please check http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~ml/HLT-EMNLP05/cfd.html for latest updates.