MAIN CONFERENCE

ACL 2022 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.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.

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SUBMISSIONS TOPICS

ACL 2022 aims to have a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

• Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

• Dialogue and Interactive Systems

• Discourse and Pragmatics

• Ethics and NLP

• Generation

• Information Extraction

• Information Retrieval and Text Mining

• Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

• Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond

• Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics

• Machine Learning for NLP

• Machine Translation and Multilinguality

• NLP Applications

• Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation

• Question Answering

• Resources and Evaluation

• Semantics: Lexical

• Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, and Other Areas

• Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

• Speech and Multimodality

• Summarization

• Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

• Theme: “Language Diversity: from Low-Resource to Endangered Languages”

 

ACL 2022 Theme Track: “Language Diversity: from Low-Resource to Endangered Languages”

Following the success of the ACL 2020 and the ACL 2021 Theme tracks, we are happy to announce that ACL 2022 will have a new theme to commemorate the 60th anniversary of ACL with the goal of reflecting and stimulating discussion about how the advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing can be used to promote language diversity from low-resource to endangered languages.

 

According to Ethnologue, there are more than 7,000 living languages in the world today, yet the majority of speech and language technologies have focused only on a small subset of these languages. For ACL 2022, we seek papers that discuss and reflect on the “role of the speech and language technologies in sustaining language use” (Bird, 2020) for the large variety of world languages with focus on under-resourced, indigenous, and/or endangered languages. What are the challenges for developing and scaling up the current NLP technologies for the rich diversity of human languages and what are the ethical, cultural and policy implications of such technologies for the local communities? We invite researchers to submit position, opinion, modelling, and resource papers on the following topics:

 

• Reflecting on the NLP community’s current progress on building speech and language technologies for under-resourced, indigenous and/or endangered languages and how we can make meaningful advances in the future.

• Discussions of how computational linguistic research could make (and has made) both positive and negative impact on language diversity and novel approaches to foster the positive while mitigating any negative impact. 

• What computational methods and/or paradigms are needed for building adequate speech and language technologies for under-resourced, indigenous and/or endangered languages? (e.g., is the zero-resource scenario meaningful? How to exploit typological information? How to build models for highly complex morphological languages such as polysynthetic languages? Is the human-in-the-loop paradigm the way forward?)

• Quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods to assess the impact of NLP research for sustaining language maintenance and use for the large diversity of world languages.

• Ways in which NLP practitioners can partner with language communities to develop impactful research (including data collection) and applications that can help sustain language use for indigenous and/or endangered languages, including such impacts as the development of teaching and learning materials for both children and adults.

• Discussions of how heavily aligned NLP research should be with the goals of language communities w.r.t to their languages (e.g., is the loss of knowledge or the loss of language the priority for a particular language community).

 

You can find more details here. 

 

We anticipate having a special session for this theme at the conference and a best Thematic Paper Award in addition to the traditional Best Paper Awards.

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PAPER SUBMISSION PROCESS

 

ACL Rolling Review

ACL 2022 and NAACL 2022  have decided to help implement the vision of using the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) for major conference submissions and have worked out a coordinated submission plan to allow for maximum flexibility for the authors. ARR is a new review system for *ACL conferences, where reviewing and acceptance of papers to publication venues is done in a two-step process: (1) centralized rolling review via ARR and (2) commitment to a publication venue (e.g., ACL 2022). The purpose of ACL Rolling Review is to improve efficiency and turnaround of reviewing in *ACL conferences while keeping the diversity (geographic and otherwise) and editorial freedom. 

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Important Dates for ACL 2022

Anonymity period begins

1 month before submitting to the ACL Rolling Review 

 

Paper submission deadline to ARR

(long & short papers that want to be considered for ACL 2022 need to be submitted to ARR latest by November 15, 2021)

November 15, 2021

 

Commitment deadline for ACL 2022

(deadline for authors to submit their reviewed papers, reviews, and meta-review to ACL 2022)

January 15, 2022

 

Notification of acceptance

February 23, 2022

 

Deadline for authors to withdraws papers from ACL 2022 or Findings of ACL 2022

February 26, 2022

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Camera-ready version of papers due

March 15, 2022

 

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

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ACL Rolling  Review Submission Process and Submission Deadline for ACL 2022

When authors submit a paper to the ACL Rolling Review (ARR), they need to select a preferred venue. This will allow each conference to calculate acceptance rates (see more details on acceptance rates in the ACL 2022 Chairs Blog).  Please select ACL 2022 if at the time of submitting to ARR you intend to have your paper considered for ACL 2022. Authors can submit as early as they would like to ARR to benefit from multiple rounds of reviews up to November 15, 2021, which is the latest submission deadline to ARR for a paper to be considered  for ACL 2022. This means the authors can submit to ARR on September 15, October 15, and November 15 and select ACL 2022 as their preferred venue. The paper will be assigned an ARR Action Editor, who will make sure that appropriate reviewers are selected for their paper. Besides general topics of ARR, ACL 2022 will have a Special Theme on “Language Diversity: from Low-resource to Endangered Languages”. ACL 2022 will work with ARR to select Action Editors and reviewers for the special theme and will provide a special review form for these papers.

 

The papers will be reviewed within the ARR timeline (usually, on the 20th of the month following their submission, the authors will receive reviews and meta-reviews).  The authors can decide to address the comments and to submit a revised version of their paper to ARR and/or to commit the current version of their paper with the associated ARR reviews and meta-reviews to ACL 2022. The deadline for committing a version of a paper with the associated ARR reviews and meta-review to ACL 2022 is January 7, 2022. 

 

Commitment Deadline, Process, and Period for ACL 2022

On or before January 15, 2022, the authors need to commit a given version of their paper for consideration to ACL 2022.  The authors would be able to commit their paper to ACL 2022 only if the paper has received reviews and meta-reviews in ARR by the commitment deadline. That is why the ACL 2022 team has set the submission deadline to ARR for ACL 2022 to November 15, 2021 to make sure that by January 15, 2022 all submitted papers have reviews and meta-reviews (we have allowed for some unforeseen delays and several holidays at the end of December and in early January). If the paper has multiple versions (revisions), only the latest version that has reviews and meta-reviews is allowed to be committed to ACL 2022. A given version of the paper can only be committed to *one* venue at a time.  Note: the authors can decide to revise their paper and submit to ARR for another round of reviews, while a version of their paper is committed to ACL 2022. When committing to ACL 2022, the authors will send a version of the paper with the associated reviews, meta-review and an optional comment to Senior Area Chairs. 

 

ACL 2022 will have several areas including the special theme track, and each area will have several Senior Area Chairs. We have decided to appoint more SACs per area than has been customary until now in order to make sure each paper is properly considered by at least one SAC. We will also ensure that a reviewer or Action Editor in ARR for a paper cannot be a SAC for that paper. The comment addressed to the Senior Area Chairs is intended mainly to raise concerns about objective misunderstandings of reviewers and/or Action Editor with regard to technical parts of the paper that the authors consider will help the Senior Area Chairs in their decision process. ACL 2022 SACs will provide a short, written justification for their decision for each paper that will be considered by the Program Co-Chairs for their final decision. We have decided to allow such an optional comment to the Senior Area Chairs particularly for papers that will be submitted to the latest deadline and would not have time to benefit from multiple rounds of reviewing. We encourage the authors to submit early (e.g., September 15, 2022) to benefit from multiple rounds of reviews, which we believe will reduce the need to send a comment to the Senior Area Chairs. 

 

Authors will receive the acceptance/rejection decision by February 23, 2022. Thus, the commitment period of a paper to ACL 2022 is January 15, 2022 – February 23, 2022. In case of acceptance, authors will have until February 26, 2022 to reconsider their commitment to publish at ACL 2022 or at the Findings of ACL 2022.  If the authors decide to withdraw from ACL 2022 or from the Findings of ACL 2022, they need to let the Program Co-Chairs know by February 26, 2022. Withdrawn papers from ACL 2022 or from the Findings of ACL 2022 as well as rejected papers from ACL 2022 can be committed to NAACL 2022 (either the same version of the paper or an improved version) by the NAACL 2022 commitment deadline (March 2, 2022). 

 

More details can be found in the ACL 2022 Chairs Blog. 

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Long Papers

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.

 

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 long papers presented as posters.

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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 include:

• A small, focused contribution

• A negative result

• An opinion piece

• An interesting application nugget

 

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.

 

Short papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. 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 short papers presented as posters.

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Theme Papers

The submission requirements for theme papers are the same as for long papers. However, the nature of a long paper is different from a short paper and will be reviewed using a different review form. See details on the distinction between a regular paper and a theme paper here. 

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IMPORTANT: Anonymity Period

1 month before submission to ARR. See ARR CFP guidelines.

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Instructions for Double-Blind Review

See ARR CFP guidelines on Double-Blind Review. 

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Authorship

See ARR CFP guidelines on Authorship.  

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Citation and Comparison

See ARR CFP guidelines on Citation and Comparison.  

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Multiple Submission Policy

We follow the ARR Multiple Submission Policy. See the ARR CFP guidelines on Multiple Submission Policy. In addition, we are working with NAACL 2022 and with the ACL 2022 workshops to ensure that our timelines are coordinated and that the ACL 2022 notifications will be sent out before the submissions deadlines for NAACL 2022 and the ACL 2022 workshops. See details about how this is implemented in the scenarios mentioned in the ACL 2022 Chairs Blog.

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Ethics Policy

Authors are required to honour the ethical code set out in the ACL Code of Ethics. See the ARR Author Checklist on Ethics. 

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Reproducibility Criteria

See ARR Author Checklist. 

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Paper Submission and Templates

The paper submissions will be done via ARR. For more information about templates, guidelines, and instructions, see the ARR CFP guidelines.

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Optional Supplementary Materials: Appendices, Software, and Data

See the ARR CFP guidelines.

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PRESENTATION REQUIREMENT

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. The authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL 2022 or at the Findings of ACL 2022 must notify the program chairs by February 23, 2022 if they wish to withdraw their paper.

 

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for ACL 2022 by the early registration deadline.

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CONTACT INFORMATION

General chair:

Bernardo Magnini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

 

Program co-chairs:

Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University, USA

Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar

Aline Villavicencio, University of Sheffield, UK

 

Email: pcs.acl2022@gmail.com