2021Q3 Reports: Demonstration Chairs

By: Heng Ji, Jong C. Park and Rui Xia (ACL2021 Demo Co-Chairs)

The web site for ACL 2021 Demonstrations Track is: https://2021.aclweb.org/calls/demos/ which includes details about submissions, deadlines, reviewing policy and important dates. Specifically, in the submission details, we encouraged the authors to include visual aids (e.g., screenshots, snapshots, or diagrams) in the paper. This year the submissions are single blind, in which the authors are allowed to disclose their names on their submitted manuscript. We kept the style files same as last year. We have also adopted the ethics policy from NAACL2021, honoring ACM Code of Ethics. The deadline for submissions was extended to April 15, 2021 to receive more submissions.

We received 133 paper submissions, among which 131 papers are valid with full paper submissions. We accepted 43 papers, and rejected 88 papers, the acceptance rate is 32%.

We composed an independent Best Demo Award Committee to select the best demo paper award. The composition of the committee ensures diversity in terms of research areas, academia vs. industry and gender.

• Radu Florian (IBM Research, Chair)
• Elizabeth Boschee (ISI)
• Ying Lin (Apple)
• Nazneen Rajani (Salesforce)
• Han Wang (Amazon Alexa AI)
• Diyi Yang (Georgia Tech)

The best demo award committee thoroughly reviewed the accepted papers, their reviews and pre-recorded demo videos. They had extensive discussions and finally selected one paper as the best demo award, and one paper as the best demo runner-up. The best demo paper award, along with detailed justifications will be posted at the ACL2021 website.

We have also compiled the proceedings for the demo track, and coordinated with PC chairs to finalize the demo track’s schedule at the virtual conference.