{ "id": "epfgbe00x7", "slug": "association-for-computational-linguistics", "title": "Association for Computational Linguistics", "updated": "2026-10-25", "topic_path": [ { "id": "society", "label": "Society and history", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/society" }, { "id": "society.education", "label": "Education and knowledge institutions", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/society.education" }, { "id": "society.education.research", "label": "Cross-disciplinary research and learned institutions", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/society.education.research" }, { "id": "society.education.research.learned-society-concept", "label": "Learned societies", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/society.education.research.learned-society-concept" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.nongeo.t1946.society.education", "label": "Non-geographic · 1946 to 2000: Education and knowledge institutions", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.nongeo.t1946.society.education", "path": [ { "id": "geo.nongeo", "label": "Non-geographic", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.nongeo" }, { "id": "geo.nongeo.t1946", "label": "Non-geographic · 1946 to 2000", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.nongeo.t1946" }, { "id": "geo.nongeo.t1946.society", "label": "Society and history", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.nongeo.t1946.society" }, { "id": "geo.nongeo.t1946.society.education", "label": "Education and knowledge institutions", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.nongeo.t1946.society.education" } ] }, { "id": "geo.nongeo.t2021.society", "label": "Non-geographic · 2021 and later: Society and history", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.nongeo.t2021.society", "path": [ { "id": "geo.nongeo", "label": "Non-geographic", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.nongeo" }, { "id": "geo.nongeo.t2021", "label": "Non-geographic · 2021 and later", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.nongeo.t2021" }, { "id": "geo.nongeo.t2021.society", "label": "Society and history", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.nongeo.t2021.society" } ] } ], "excerpt": "The Association for Computational Linguistics is an international society for computational linguistics, founded in 1962. It maintains the ACL Anthology, which contains over 131,000 papers.", "snippet": "The Association for Computational Linguistics is an international society for computational linguistics, founded in 1962. It maintains the ACL Anthology, which contains over 131,000 papers.", "node": "society.education.research.learned-society-concept", "markdown": "# Association for Computational Linguistics\n\nThe **Association for Computational Linguistics** (ACL) is the international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field known as computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). It was founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL) and became the ACL in 1968.[1](https://2023.aclweb.org/participants/about_acl/) Its main activities are an annual summer meeting and the sponsorship of the journal *Computational Linguistics*, published by [MIT Press](https://www.edgepedia.org/mit-press).[1](https://2023.aclweb.org/participants/about_acl/) The name ACL is also used by unrelated organizations, including the U.S. Administration for Community Living and the American Clinical Laboratory Association; this article covers the linguistics society.\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Founded | 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL); renamed ACL in 1968[1](https://2023.aclweb.org/participants/about_acl/) |\n| Publications | Sponsors the journal *Computational Linguistics* (MIT Press) and the conference-based *Transactions of the ACL* (TACL)[1](https://2023.aclweb.org/participants/about_acl/) |\n| Annual meeting | ACL 2026 is the 64th Annual Meeting in San Diego, California; ACL 2027 is the 65th, in Kyoto, Japan[2](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/node/2483) |\n| Conference scale | ACL 2025 in Vienna drew over 5,000 in-person attendees; the ACL 2026 San Diego venue has a maximum capacity of 3,500[3](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) |\n| ACL Anthology | 131,708 papers, 135,457 authors, 3,512 volumes, 534 venues, spanning 75 years[4](https://aclanthology.org/) |\n| Reviewing system | *CL conferences select papers through ACL Rolling Review (ARR), which received over 10,000 and 17,000 submissions in recent ACL and EMNLP cycles[5](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-arr-co-editors-chief-0) |\n| Governance | An Executive Committee passes formal resolutions on policy, publication ethics, awards, and special interest groups[6](https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/ACL_Resolutions) |\n\n## History and purpose\n\nThe society began in 1962 with a focus on machine translation, under the name Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics, and adopted its current name in 1968.[1](https://2023.aclweb.org/participants/about_acl/) [Computational linguistics](https://www.edgepedia.org/computational-linguistics), as the society describes it, is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective: researchers build computational models of linguistic phenomena that may be knowledge-based and hand-crafted, or data-driven and statistical, with motivations ranging from explaining linguistic phenomena to building components of working speech and language systems such as speech recognizers, text-to-speech synthesizers, and web search engines.[1](https://2023.aclweb.org/participants/about_acl/)\n\n## Conferences\n\nThe ACL Annual Meeting is the society's flagship event, held each summer.[1](https://2023.aclweb.org/participants/about_acl/) Recent editions show the field's growth: ACL 2025 in Vienna exceeded 5,000 in-person attendees, and registration for ACL 2026 in San Diego was organized in phases because the contracted venue holds at most 3,500 people.[3](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) The meeting series is numbered: ACL 2026 is the 64th Annual Meeting, and ACL 2027 will be the 65th, in Kyoto, Japan.[2](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/node/2483)\n\n**Family of venues.** The ACL conference family includes the European Chapter (EACL), the Conference on [Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://www.edgepedia.org/empirical-methods-in-natural-language-processing) (EMNLP), the North American Chapter ([NAACL](https://www.edgepedia.org/north-american-chapter-of-the-association-for-computational-linguistics)), and the Asian Chapter (AACL), whose joint AACL-IJCNLP 2026 event, the 5th AACL and 15th IJCNLP, was held in Hengqin, China, from November 6 to 10, 2026.[7](https://github.com/acl-org/aacl-2026/blob/main/_pages/calls/main_conference_papers.md) The main conference invites long and short papers on all aspects of computational linguistics and NLP, and explicitly welcomes negative findings, surveys, resources, position papers, linguistic insights, and replication studies.[8](https://2026.aclweb.org/calls/main_conference_papers/) Papers submitted to the main conference but not selected there are automatically considered for the [Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://www.edgepedia.org/findings-of-the-association-for-computational-linguistics), a companion publication series.[8](https://2026.aclweb.org/calls/main_conference_papers/) An industry track solicits papers on systems deployed in real-world settings, including those using large language models.[9](https://2026.aclweb.org/calls/industry_track/)\n\nProceedings production is standardized across the family. Publication chairs compile the main conference proceedings, companion volumes, and workshop proceedings and deliver them to the ACL Anthology, a workflow supported by the ACLPUB package, a set of scripts, templates, and makefiles created by [Jason Eisner](https://www.edgepedia.org/jason-eisner) and Philipp Koehn for ACL 2005 and since integrated into the START conference system.[10](https://acl-org.github.io/conference-handbook/pre_2024/publication/)\n\n## ACL Anthology\n\nThe ACL Anthology (aclanthology.org) is the society's digital archive of research papers in computational linguistics and NLP, hosting papers from official ACL venues and from other organizations.[4](https://aclanthology.org/) As of its latest site statistics it contains 131,708 papers from 534 venues over 75 years of publication.[4](https://aclanthology.org/) A 2023 retrospective reported growth from roughly 52,000 papers and about 170 venues in 2019 to over 88,000 papers and nearly 400 venues in 2023, an increase of almost 70 percent in five years.[11](https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlposs-1.10/)\n\nAll papers and materials in the [Anthology](https://www.edgepedia.org/anthology) are open access, provided without barrier under open licenses; materials ingested since 2016 carry a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.[11](https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlposs-1.10/) The Anthology is built from a public repository containing metadata in XML and YAML, a Python library, and the code that generates the website.[11](https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlposs-1.10/) Its development has been largely volunteer-driven, though since 2021 the ACL has funded assistants contributing about 20 hours a month to ingesting new material.[11](https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlposs-1.10/)\n\n## Peer review and ACL Rolling Review\n\n*CL conferences use ACL Rolling Review (ARR) as their submission and reviewing system: authors submit to an ARR cycle, receive reviews and a meta-review, and then commit the paper to a conference, where Senior Area Chairs and Program Chairs make the acceptance decision.[8](https://2026.aclweb.org/calls/main_conference_papers/) Submission volume has grown sharply; in the recent two cycles tied to ACL and EMNLP, ARR received over 10,000 and over 17,000 submissions respectively.[5](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-arr-co-editors-chief-0)\n\n**Sustainable reviewing policy.** In September 2026 the ACL Executive Committee approved a sustainable reviewing policy proposed by the ACL Peer Review Standing Committee, to apply to ARR submissions from October 2026.[6](https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/ACL_Resolutions) • [12](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-sustainable-reviewing-policy) Its stated motivation is that submissions are growing far faster than reviewer capacity: 38 percent of the roughly 17,000 May 2026 submissions came from authors with no available publication record.[12](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-sustainable-reviewing-policy) The policy caps reviewed submissions at available reviewer capacity, requires each submission to provide a qualified service contributor (a reviewer or chair), sends submissions without service capacity to a lottery for spare capacity, and introduces per-author caps of 20 total submissions and 5 first-author submissions per cycle.[12](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-sustainable-reviewing-policy) Offsetting measures broaden reviewer qualifications, add a mentorship program for newcomers, and allow experienced secondary reviewers to become fully qualified through a certification path.[12](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-sustainable-reviewing-policy)\n\n## Governance and resolutions\n\nOfficial public information is issued by the ACL Executive Board through its Admin Wiki, which carries the ACL Constitution, officer lists, policies, award winners, and reports.[13](https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/Main_Page) The Executive Committee passes formal resolutions recorded on the wiki; recent examples include a December 2025 resolution adopting distinct review processes for TACL and *Computational Linguistics* papers, and an August 2026 resolution under which ACL may retract published papers for violations that would have warranted desk rejection, with confirmed fabricated or hallucinated references made grounds for desk rejection.[6](https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/ACL_Resolutions) Other resolutions have created special interest groups, such as SIGIL on Image and Language in 2025 and SIGVAR on Similar Language, Varieties and Dialects in 2026, and set policies on authorship changes, conflicts of interest for program committee chairs, and conference branding.[6](https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/ACL_Resolutions)\n\nThe society's contact address is in [Kerrville, Texas](https://www.edgepedia.org/kerrville-texas), United States.[5](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-arr-co-editors-chief-0)\n\n## References\n\n1. [About ACL, ACL 2023 conference website](https://2023.aclweb.org/participants/about_acl/)\n2. [Annual Meetings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL Member Portal](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/node/2483)\n3. [Registration, ACL 2026](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/)\n4. [ACL Anthology](https://aclanthology.org/)\n5. [Call for Nominations of ARR co-Editors-in-Chief, ACL Member Portal](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/call-nominations-arr-co-editors-chief-0)\n6. [ACL Resolutions, ACL Admin Wiki](https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/ACL_Resolutions)\n7. [AACL-IJCNLP 2026 Call for Main Conference Papers, acl-org GitHub](https://github.com/acl-org/aacl-2026/blob/main/_pages/calls/main_conference_papers.md)\n8. [Main Conference Call for Papers, ACL 2026](https://2026.aclweb.org/calls/main_conference_papers/)\n9. [Industry Track Call for Papers, ACL 2026](https://2026.aclweb.org/calls/industry_track/)\n10. [Publication Chairs, ACL Conference Handbook](https://acl-org.github.io/conference-handbook/pre_2024/publication/)\n11. [Marcel Bollmann, Nathan Schneider, Arne Köhn, and Matt Post (2023). Two Decades of the ACL Anthology: Development, Impact, and Open Challenges. NLP-OSS 2023.](https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlposs-1.10/)\n12. [ACL Sustainable Reviewing Policy, ACL Member Portal](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-sustainable-reviewing-policy)\n13. [Admin Wiki Main Page, ACL Admin Wiki](https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/Main_Page)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Education and knowledge institutions › Cross-disciplinary research and learned institutions › Learned societies*\n\n*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/association-for-computational-linguistics", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/association-for-computational-linguistics.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"Association for Computational Linguistics\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/association-for-computational-linguistics. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[Association for Computational Linguistics](https://www.edgepedia.org/association-for-computational-linguistics)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/association-for-computational-linguistics](https://www.edgepedia.org/association-for-computational-linguistics). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"Association for Computational Linguistics\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/association-for-computational-linguistics. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "The Association for Computational Linguistics is an international society for computational linguistics, founded in 1962. It maintains the ACL Anthology, which contains over 131,000 papers." }