Call for Main Conference Papers

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ACL 2023 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) and by the Computational Linguistics (CL) journals.

All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).

ACL 2023 aims to have a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

Following the success of the ACL 2020-2022 Theme tracks, we are happy to announce that ACL 2023 will have a new theme with the goal of reflecting and stimulating discussion about the current state of development of the field of NLP. While the current systems perform much better and fail more gracefully than their rule-based predecessors, there are growing piles of evidence of other kinds of brittleness, including out-of-domain generalization, adversarial attacks, spurious patterns (both linguistic and social), lack of sensitivity to basic linguistic perturbations such as negation, over-sensitivity to perturbations that should not matter (e.g. order and wording of prompts), etc.

The theme track invites empirical and theoretical research, as well position and survey papers reflecting on the ways in which reported performance improvements on NLP benchmarks are meaningful. The possible topics of discussion include (but are not limited to) the following:

The theme track submissions can be either long or short. We anticipate having a special session for this theme at the conference and a Thematic Paper Award in addition to other categories of awards.

Long papers must describe substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages), so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.

Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead, short papers should have a small, focused contribution - a point that can be made in a few pages with sufficient level of detail. Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Final versions of short papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 5 pages), so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.

Both short and long papers are submitted through the same process, but they will be reviewed using a different review form and criteria. Short and long papers will be distinguished in the proceedings, but the length of the paper does not correspond to either the final presentation format (poster or oral), or the type of contribution made in the paper. In particular, ACL 2023 welcomes the following kinds of contributions:

While there is no direct mapping between types of contributions and paper length, some kinds of papers naturally gravitate towards a certain length: e.g. surveys are more likely to be long rather than short papers. One paper can make more than one contribution of different types.

Following EMNLP2022 and EACL 2023, ACL 2023 will continue to offer a hybrid submission format with respect to ACL Rolling Review (ARR): the submissions may come through ARR, but it will also be possible to submit directly to ACL through the START system. A given submission may only choose one of these two options, i.e. it is not possible to receive both direct and ARR reviews.

The papers submitted directly to ACL will have the “regular” review process: paper reviewed by 3 reviewers, authors are invited to write an author response and revise their paper before the camera ready deadline, if accepted. The START system deadline for direct submission papers is January 13, 2023.

Papers submitted to ACL 2023, but not selected for the main conference, will also automatically be considered for publication in the Findings of the Association of Computational Linguistics. The notifications for the main track and Findings will come out simultaneously, and the authors of submissions accepted to Findings may opt to withdraw until May 8.

ARR papers committed to ACL will be handled by the Senior Area Chairs. For these papers, the authors may provide an author response but not revise their paper (with the exception of adding the required “limitations” section, if it was missing from the ARR submission; see below).

To be considered by ACL 2023, ARR papers need to be submitted to ARR and obtain all its reviews and meta-review by the commitment deadline of March 17. These papers cannot be modified except that they can be associated with an author response. They also cannot be revised and re-submitted to ARR for a new review cycle while they are considered by ACL 2023.

Note: Generally, to receive reviews by the commitment deadline, the regular ARR timeline suggests that ARR suggestions should be made by December 15th. Note that the cycle length will change in December to 8 weeks.

ARR papers will also be considered by ACL 2023 if they were withdrawn from ARR before January 1st, 2023 and submitted directly to ACL 2023.

Papers submitted to ACL 2023 may not be submitted for review elsewhere (including ARR) while being under review at ACL 2023.

All submissions to ACL 2023 must follow the following policies.

The direct submissions to ACL may not be made available online (e.g. via a preprint server) in a non-anonymized form after December 20 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (for arXiv, note that this refers to publication time, not submission time). The respective deadline for ARR is November 15th. Non-anonymous preprints that were published before the start of the anonymity period may not be updated until ACL notifications come out. The only exception is for the purpose of correcting names, in which case the PC chairs should be notified per ACL policy. The existence of non-anonymous preprints must be disclosed in the submission form.

ACL does not prohibit giving talks about work under review in small groups, but we ask you not to advertise the preprint (or such talks) on social media, blog about this work, or have it covered in the media during the anonymity period. Anonymous preprints (e.g. on ARR) can be posted after the start of the anonymity period, but likewise should not be advertised by their authors or their close colleagues, as that can compromise the review process.

The submissions to ACL and any supplementary materials must not include authors’ names and affiliations, or the acknowledgements section. Self-references that reveal the authors’ identities must be avoided. For example, instead of “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …” or even “We previously showed (Anonymous, 1991)… “ please use “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”.

The submissions should avoid links to non-anonymized repositories: the code should be either submitted as supplementary material, or as a link to an anonymized repository (e.g., Anonymous GitHub or Anonym Share). Please avoid any links to storage services like Dropbox (which may track the reviewers downloading the resources). Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

The author list for submissions should include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the work presented. The list of the authors (including the order) may not be changed after submission.

See the policy in the ARR CFP. Papers should not refer for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers. If important citations are not available to reviewers (e.g., awaiting publication), these paper/s should be anonymised and included in the appendix. They can then be referenced from the submission without compromising anonymity.

The templates will be soon available at the conference website. Submissions with style violations will be desk-rejected. We recommend using the ACL Pubcheck tool to confirm that your submission conforms to the standards prior to submission, so as to avoid desk rejections.

ACL 2023 submissions will be expected to contain a Limitations section, and also a supplement with the Responsible NLP checklist that covers reproducibility and ethics considerations. It may also optionally include an ethics/broader impact section. These will not count towards the page limit. We encourage the authors to have a look at the Responsible NLP checklist as early as possible in the cycle of their project, to make sure that any necessary IRB permissions are obtained, experiment parameters saved, and energy expenditure is estimated.

In principle, papers submitted directly to ACL must not be under review for any other archival venue at any time during the ACL review process. We will not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere. However, considering the overlap of the paper submission due and the notification of acceptance of EACL 2023, we allow an exception for the multiple submission policy; a work under review for EACL 2023 can be submitted to ACL, but must be declared at submission time and withdrawn from ACL no later than January 31 if the work is accepted to EACL 2023.

The papers previously reviewed at other *ACL venues (but not through ARR) have the option to submit the paper together with the link to the previous softconf submission, from which the track chairs will be able to access the old reviews. They will also be able to submit a short explanation of how the paper was changed in response to the old reviews. This option could be beneficial for the authors who have addressed the problems identified before, and can argue strongly for how the paper has been improved. The prior reviews will not be seen by the new reviewers, but they may be used by the area chairs and program chairs in review quality control, resolving disagreements between reviewers, and in deciding borderline papers.

The papers submitted for reviewing directly to ACL 2023 and not selected by the main conference will be able to submit to ACL 2023 workshops after the ACL notifications, with the reviews and meta-reviews they received at ACL. Papers accepted to Findings can also apply for presentation at participating workshops. The deadlines for direct submission to be reviewed by the workshops will be determined by the individual workshops.

Authors are required to honor the ethical code set out in the ACL Code of Ethics.

As mentioned above, ACL 2023 will incorporate the Responsible NLP Research checklist into the reviewing process. It should accompany all submissions, and its goal is to present structured information about the ethics and reproducibility aspects of the study. It will be available for the reviewers, as well as any future readers of the paper. Especially for the junior authors, we strongly suggest that they consider the checklist at the early stages of their project, rather than treating such questions as an afterthought.

Should the reviewers still have concerns about the ethical aspects of a given submission, it may be passed on to the ACL ethics committee for extra ethics review. ACL reserves the right to reject papers on ethical grounds, where the authors are judged to have operated counter to the code of ethics, or have inadequately addressed legitimate ethical concerns with their work.

All papers accepted to the main conference track must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings, and at least one author must register for ACL 2023. All papers accepted to the main track or Findings will be required to submit a presentation video. The conference will be hybrid, with an emphasis on encouraging interaction between the online and in-person modalities, and thus presentations can be either on-site or virtual.