Update, 5th May 2018: Authors of accepted papers should read the instructions for camera-ready submissions

The ACL 2018 conference invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.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 journal.

Important Note

ACL 2018 adopts the new policies for submission, review, and citation. Submissions that violate any of these policies will be rejected without review. Most importantly, the policies refer to the anonymity period, which starts at January 22nd, 2018 for ACL 2018.

  • You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period.

  • You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

The details are described in the section ACL Author Guidelines. For the background of the new policies, refer to the online version.

Key Dates

  • February 22nd, 2018: Submission Deadline (Main Conference)
  • March 27th, 2018: Submission Deadline (System Demonstrations)
  • March 26th–28th, 2018: Author Response Period
  • April 20th, 2018: Notification of Acceptance
  • May 11th, 2018: Camera-ready Due
  • July 15th, 2018: Tutorials; Welcome Reception
  • July 16th–18th, 2018: Main Conference; System Demonstrations; Student Research Workshop
  • July 19th–20th, 2018: Workshops

All deadlines are: 11:59pm UTC-12

Submission Guidelines

ACL 2018 has the goal of a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

  • Dialogue and Interactive Systems
  • Discourse and Pragmatics
  • Document Analysis
  • Generation
  • Information Extraction and Text Mining
  • Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
  • Machine Learning
  • Machine Translation
  • Multidisciplinary
  • Multilinguality
  • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
  • Question Answering
  • Resources and Evaluation
  • Sentence-level Semantics
  • Sentiment Analysis and Argument Mining
  • Social Media
  • Summarization
  • Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing
  • Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
  • Vision, Robotics, Multimodal, Grounding and Speech
  • Word-level Semantics

Detailed descriptions of these areas are provided in the bottom of this document.

Long Papers

Long ACL 2018 submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Review forms will be made available prior to the deadlines.

Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited 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.

Long papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between long papers presented orally and as posters.

Short Papers

ACL 2018 also solicits short papers. 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 point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of short papers are:

  • A small, focused contribution
  • Work in progress
  • A negative result
  • An opinion piece
  • An interesting application nugget

Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions.

Short papers will be presented in one or more oral or poster sessions. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented orally and as posters.

General Notes

Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers. Papers may be accompanied by a resource (software and/or data) described in the paper. Papers that are submitted with accompanying software/data may receive additional credit toward the overall evaluation score, and the potential impact of the software and data will be taken into account when making the acceptance/rejection decisions.

Supplementary Material

ACL 2018 also encourages the submission of supplementary material to report preprocessing decisions, model parameters, and other details necessary for the replication of the experiments reported in the paper. Seemingly small preprocessing decisions can sometimes make a large difference in performance, so it is crucial to record such decisions to precisely characterize state-of-the-art methods.

Nonetheless, supplementary material should be supplementary (rather than central) to the paper. It may include explanations or details of proofs or derivations that do not fit into the paper, lists of features or feature templates, sample inputs and outputs for a system, pseudo-code or source code, and data. The paper should not rely on the supplementary material: while the paper may refer to and cite the supplementary material and the supplementary material will be available to reviewers, they will not be asked to review or even download the supplementary material. Authors should refer to the contents of the supplementary material in the paper submission, so that reviewers interested in these supplementary details will know where to look.

Note: The supplementary material does not form part of the paper, does not count towards page limit and should not be included in the “Appendix” section of the ACL template (despite the unfortunate wording). The “container” for supplementary materials is a separate document, and these materials should be submitted separately to the paper using the appropriate field on the review form.

Anonymity

As the reviewing will be blind, papers must not include authors’ names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …“ must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …“ Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Paper Submission and Templates

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system. The submission site is open at:

https://www.softconf.com/acl2018/papers/

Long/short paper submissions must use the official ACL 2018 style templates. Long papers must not exceed eight (8) pages of content. Short papers must not exceed four (4) pages of content. References do not count against these limits.

Style files were updated on 14th April, 2018 to clarify the location of supplementary material. All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in these template files.

Multiple Submission Policy

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time in the START submission form, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted by ACL 2018. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL 2018 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented. We will not accept for publication or presentation the papers that overlap significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere.

Authors submitting more than one paper to ACL 2018 must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.

ACL Author Guidelines

ACL 2018 adopts the following guidelines for submission and citation. Submissions that do not conform to these guidelines will be rejected without review.

Preserving Double Blind Review

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

  • You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

  • If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

  • Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you may consider submitting your work to the Computational Linguistics journal, which does not require anonymization and has a track for “short” (i.e., conference-length) papers.

Citation and Comparison

If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:

  • You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited).

  • In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.

Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

Presentation Requirement

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for ACL 2018 by the early registration deadline.

Contact Information

  • General chair: Claire Cardie (Cornell University)
  • Program co-chairs: Iryna Gurevych (Technische Universität Darmstadt) and Yusuke Miyao (National Institute of Informatics)
  • Email: acl2018pc@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de

Area Chairs

“*” indicates senior area chairs, who are responsible for maintaining the review process in each area.

  • Dialogue and Interactive Systems:
    • Asli Celikyilmaz *
    • Verena Rieser
    • Milica Gasic
    • Jason Williams
  • Discourse and Pragmatics:
    • Manfred Stede
    • Ani Nenkova *
  • Document Analysis:
    • Hang Li *
    • Yiqun Liu
    • Eugene Agichtein
  • Generation:
    • Ioannis Konstas
    • Claire Gardent *
  • Information Extraction and Text Mining:
    • Feiyu Xu
    • Kevin Cohen
    • Zhiyuan Liu
    • Ralph Grishman *
    • Yi Yang
    • Nazli Goharian
  • Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics:
    • Shuly Wintner *
    • Tim O'Donnell *
  • Machine Learning:
    • Andre Martins
    • Ariadna Quattoni
    • Jun Suzuki *
  • Machine Translation:
    • Yang Liu
    • Matt Post *
    • Lucia Specia
    • Dekai Wu
  • Multidisciplinary (also for AC COI):
    • Yoav Goldberg
    • Anders Søgaard
    • Mirella Lapata
  • Multilinguality:
    • Bernardo Magnini *
    • Tristan Miller
  • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation:
    • Graham Neubig
    • Hai Zhao *
  • Question Answering:
    • Lluís Màrquez *
    • Teruko Mitamura
    • Zornitsa Kozareva
    • Richard Socher
  • Resources and Evaluation:
    • Gerard de Melo
    • Sara Tonelli
    • Karën Fort *
  • Sentence-level Semantics:
    • Luke Zettlemoyer *
    • Ellie Pavlick
    • Jacob Uszkoreit
  • Sentiment Analysis and Argument Mining:
    • Smaranda Muresan
    • Benno Stein
    • Yulan He *
  • Social Media:
    • David Jurgens
    • Jing Jiang *
  • Summarization:
    • Kathleen McKeown *
    • Xiaodan Zhu
  • Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing:
    • Liang Huang *
    • Weiwei Sun
    • Željko Agić
    • Yue Zhang
  • Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics:
    • Michael Roth *
    • Fabio Massimo Zanzotto *
  • Vision, Robotics, Multimodal, Grounding and Speech:
    • Yoav Artzi *
    • Shinji Watanabe
    • Timothy Hospedales
  • Word-level Semantics:
    • Ekaterina Shutova
    • Roberto Navigli *

Detailed descriptions of areas

  • Dialogue and Interactive Systems: dialogue control models, context modeling for dialogue, dialogue act, corpora, tools and evaluation methods for developing dialogue systems, multimodal, embodied, and situated dialogue, social chatbots, open-domain dialogue systems, task-oriented dialog, dialog policy learning, state tracking, conversational understanding, response generation, pragmatic and/or semantic modelling for dialogue
  • Discourse and Pragmatics: coreference/anaphora resolution, mention detection, discourse parsing, metonymy recognition
  • Document Analysis: language modeling and topic modeling, document classification and clustering, text mining and applications, recommender systems, information retrieval, query understanding and analysis, retrieval and ranking models, cross-lingual retrieval
  • Generation: sentence generation, surface realization, referring expression generation, content selection, data-to-text, concept-to-text, story generation, storytelling, evaluation and resources
  • Information Extraction and Text Mining: named entity recognition, named entity resolution, relation extraction, event extraction, open information extraction, knowledge base population, knowledge graph acquisition and alignment, entity linking, entity disambiguation, temporal/spatial relation recognition, keyphrase extraction, text mining for formal or informal text (e.g. news, scientific text or social media text), text mining for specific domains (e.g. biomedical, clinical, chemistry, finance), cross-lingual information extraction,
  • Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics: formal theories of phonology/lexicon/syntax/semantics/pragmatics, computational models for linguistics, linguistic typology, experimental methods, language processing, neurolinguistics, language acquisition and loss, mathematical linguistics
  • Machine Learning: theoretical/empirical contributions to machine learning models for NLP/CL, Bayesian models, neural network models, online learning, reinforcement learning, transfer learning, embedding methods, relational learning, symbolic learning methods
  • Machine Translation: neural machine translation, machine translation models, machine translation evaluation, machine translation applications, word/phrase alignment models, transliteration, speech translation, domain adaptation for machine translation, low-resource machine translation, interactive and computer-assisted machine translation, tools for translators, decipherment, automatic post-editing, multimodal translation
  • Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI: any NLP/CL related topics that are not categorized into other areas, papers with area chair COI
  • Multilinguality: multilingual dictionaries/corpora, analysis of translated texts, multilingual applications
  • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation: morphological analysis, word segmentation models, theoretical models for phonology/morphology/word formation, multilingual morphology
  • Question Answering: factoid/non-factoid question answering, open-domain question answering, question interpretation, answer type classification, answer extraction, answer sentence selection, reading comprehension, community QA, cross-lingual question answering
  • Resources and Evaluation: development of linguistic resources such as corpora/treebanks/lexica/ontologies, corpus annotation methods, evaluation methodologies for NLP tasks
  • Sentence-level Semantics: semantic parsing, semantic role labelling, natural language interfaces for databases, parsing into logical forms, AMR parsing, sentence/document embeddings, program synthesis
  • Sentiment Analysis and Argument Mining: sentiment analysis, opinion mining, opinion representation, subjectivity analysis, argument analysis, argument evaluation, argumentation in discourse
  • Social Media: NLP in social media, NLP for noisy/informal text, event detection and social sensing, computational social science, trust evaluation and fake news, computational sociolinguistics, language and demographics, multilingual exchanges and code switching, sarcasm detection
  • Summarization: extractive summarization, abstractive summarization, evaluation methods for summarization, multi-document summarization, sentence simplification
  • Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing: part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, phrase chunking, phrase structure parsing, dependency parsing, deep parsing, semantic dependency parsing, grammar induction, formal grammar, string/tree/graph automata and transducers
  • Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics: recognizing textual entailment, semantic textual similarity, common-sense reasoning, story understanding, inference of implicit information, text-level semantic parsing/role labeling, metaphor analysis/generation
  • Vision, Robotics, Multimodal, Grounding and Speech: image/video captioning, multimodal QA, NLP for robotics, speech recognition, speech synthesis, language modeling for spoken language, instruction execution, language grounding, language and vision
  • Word-level Semantics: word sense disambiguation/induction, word/phrase embeddings, distributional similarity, lexical/phrasal entailment, paraphrasing, lexical knowledge acquisition, sense embeddings, sense tagging, lexical semantics, multiword expressions, selectional preferences