The 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Berlin, Germany
August 7–12 
http://acl2016.org

The Association for Computational Linguistics is pleased to announce that its annual meeting will take place in Berlin, Germany, August 7–12, 2016. The conference invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of automated language processing. As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted for theTransactions of the ACL journal (http://www.transacl.org/).

ACL 2016 has the goal of a broad technical program. Thus, ACL 2016 invites papers in the following categories:

•  Applications/tools
•  Empirical/data-driven approaches (submissions reporting negative results of sensible experiments are also welcome)
•  Resources and evaluation
•  Theoretical
•  Surveys

Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

• Cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
• Dialog and interactive systems
• Discourse and pragmatics
• Document analysis including text categorization, topic models, and retrieval
• Generation
• Information extraction, text mining, and question answering
• Machine learning
• Machine translation
• Multilinguality
• Phonology, morphology, and word segmentation
• Resources and evaluation
• Semantics
• Sentiment analysis and opinion mining
• Social media
• Speech
• Summarization
• Tagging, chunking, syntax, and parsing
• Vision, robots, and other grounding

Dates

Short Papers

•  Deadline for short paper submission:  February 29, 2016
•  Notification of acceptance:  April 15, 2016
•  Camera ready submission due:  May 19, 2016

Long Papers

•  Deadline for long paper submission:  March 18, 2016
•  Author response period:  April 28–May 1, 2016
•  Notification of acceptance:  May 24, 2016
•  Camera ready submission due:  June 7, 2016

Tutorials

•  Deadline for tutorial proposals submission:  January 15, 2016
•  Notification of acceptance:  February 12, 2016
•  Tutorial descriptions due:  March 11, 2016
•  Tutorial course material due:  July 7, 2016

All deadlines are 11:59PM Pacific Time.

Submissions

Long Papers

Long ACL 2016 submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work.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 2016 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.

Review Forms

Review forms for each paper type (applications/tools; empirical/data-driven; resources/evaluation; theoretical; survey) are available here: acl_reviewforms.tgz

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.

ACL 2016 encourages the use of systems that support reproducibility and reusability of experimental software, such as CodaLab, for the software resources submitted with papers. We hope that a variety of tools will be explored, so that strengths and weaknesses can be discussed at the conference, leading to stronger community norms in the future.

ACL 2016 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.

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.

Electronic Submission

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system at

https://www.softconf.com/acl2016/papers for long papers

https://www.softconf.com/acl2016/shortpapers for short papers.

Long paper submissions must follow the two-column format of ACL 2016 proceedings without exceeding eight (8) pages of content. References do not count against this limit. Short paper submissions must also follow the two-column format of ACL 2016 proceedings, and must not exceed four (4) pages. References do not count against this limit.

Style Files

We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files tailored for this year's conference. Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in the style files, and they must be in PDF.

Official ACL style files (.zip) (09.03.2016: updated formatting instructions!)

Instead of the acl2016.bst bilbliography file, one can also use natbib-compatible acl_natbib.bst file. Please note that there may be some technical issues with using this file but those are not likely to affect the overall conformity to the style guidelines.

Multiple Submission Policy

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted by ACL 2016. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL 2016 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 papers that overlap significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere.

Preprint servers such as arXiv.org and ACL-related workshops that do not have published proceedings in the ACL Anthology are not considered archival for purposes of submission. Authors must state in the online submission form the name of the workshop or preprint server and title of the non-archival version. The version submitted for review should be suitably anonymized and not contain references to the prior non-archival version. Reviewers will be told: "The author(s) have notified us that there exists a non-archival previous version of this paper with significantly overlapping text. We have approved submission under these circumstances, but to preserve the spirit of blind review, the current submission does not reference the non-archival version." Reviewers are free to do what they like with this information.

Authors submitting more than one paper to ACL 2016 must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.

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 2016 by the early registration deadline.

Contact Information

• General chair: Antal van den Bosch (Radboud University)
• Program co-chairs: Katrin Erk (University of Texas) and Noah Smith (University of Washington)
• Email: