2025Q3 Reports: General Chair

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ACL 2025 General Chair Report

The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025) will take place in Vienna, Austria from July 27th to August 1st, 2025. Tutorials will take place on July 27th, the main conference on July 28th-July 30th and the workshops on July 31st-August 1st. The Student Research Workshop is part of the main conference.

Program. The ACL community continues its impressive growth. For ACL 2025, we received more than 8,300 submissions, of which 1,699 papers were accepted to the main conference and 1,392 as Findings papers. The main program was shaped by our Program Chairs: Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, and Ekaterina Shutova. All *CL conferences, including ACL, continue to operate fully under the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) model, so this incredible result was possible thanks to the hard work of the ARR Editors-in-Chief — Jun Suzuki, Jing Jiang, and Xiaodan Zhu — whose close coordination with the Program Chairs greatly streamlined the process. Key to the success of the conference program was the work and support of our many Senior Area Chairs, Area Chairs, reviewers, and the Best Paper Committee led by Rada Mihalcea and Roi Reichart. This year's special theme track was "Generalization of NLP Models". The Technical Open Review Chairs, Niket Tandon and Lizhen Qu, ensured technical oversight of the ARR pipeline.

The program also includes 2 keynotes speakers, one panel, 28 workshops (overseen by the Workshop Chairs Terra Blevins and Christophe Gravier), 8 tutorials (overseen by the Tutorial Chairs Yuki Arase, David Jurgens, and Fei Xia), a rich demonstration program (overseen by the Demonstration Chairs Pushkar Mishra, Smaranda Muresan, and Tao Yu), and a strong SRW (Student Research Workshop) program (chaired by Zhu Liu, Mingyang Wang, and Jin Zhao). Notable innovations include the introduction of the new CL Doctoral Dissertation Award, combined oral and panel sessions designed to deepen research discussions, and a dedicated Findings reception event. A key reinstated feature is the Industry Track, chaired by Yunyao Li and Georg Rehm, with the goal of strengthening the bridge between academia and industry. As in previous years, TACL and CL journal papers are presented during the conference thanks to the coordination of the respective Editors-in-Chief: Asli Celikyilmaz, Roi Reichart, Dilek Hakkani-Tur (TACL) and Wei Lu (CL).

As was done in previous years, tutorial and workshop chairs from NAACL 2025 and ACL 2025 worked together to issue a joint CFP and select the proposals for each conference.

Participation. As of now (25 days before the conference), there are 4,935 registered participants (2,356 Regular, 2,579 Students). ACL 2025 will therefore by the largest conference in ACL history.

Online Conference. This year's hybrid experience again relies on Underline for content management and Whova for participant interaction. A new format innovation is the scheduling of virtual presentation sessions to run in parallel with in-person poster sessions, providing more flexibility and engagement opportunities for remote attendees.

Presentation Mode. All accepted main conference papers have oral or poster slots. Papers selected for oral presentation and combined panel sessions were chosen by the Program Chairs to ensure a diverse and balanced representation of topics. The Findings papers will have a dedicated reception event on the first day joint with their poster presentations.

Virtual Infrastructure. The Virtual Infrastructure Chairs — Manling Li, Yang Liu, and Avi Sil — coordinated the hybrid experience together with Underline. The conference will continue using Whova for communication.

Money. Sponsorship continues to play a crucial role in making ACL accessible. The Sponsorship Chairs — Raffaella Bernardi and Thomas Scialom — together with Chris Callison-Burch, ACL Sponsorship Director, secured generous support: 10 Diamond Sponsors (Citadel, Ant Group, MI, Apple, Bloomberg, Cohere, Google Research, LinkedIn, Meta, Alibaba Cloud), 11 Platinum (Oracle, Toloka, ByteDance, IBM, Huawei, Megagon Labs, Baidu, Amazon science, Tencent, snowflake); 4 Gold (Thomson Reuters, Chen Institute, Kuaishou); 3 Silver (Appen, Adobe, nexdata); 7 Bronze (Babelscape, DataOcean, Defined.AI, JPMorganChase, NatWest Group, NEC, Translated), 1 Diversity (Apple).

Communication. Internal communication was coordinated by Sara Tonelli and Yiquan Wu as Internal Communication Chairs. The conference used Slack (managed by Nitin Madnani) for coordination among chairs, and Freshdesk (set up with the support of Sudipta Kar and Freda Shi) for routing and handling the high volume of participant inquiries.

Handbooks. The handbook chairs (Els Lefever and Qiongkai Xu) produced two versions as in previous years: a printed version (with partial program information) and an online version updated continuously up to the conference.

Proceedings. The publications chairs (Pierpaolo Basile, Libo Qin, and Zhenghao Liu) coordinated the production of all proceedings (Main, Findings, Demos, SRW, Workshops, Tutorials, Industry Track).

SRW funding. The Student Research Workshop chairs and faculty advisors secured funding from the Vienna Meeting Fund ($30,000) and ACL ($10,000), providing support for the participation of 15 student researchers.

Diversity & Inclusion. The D&I subsidies ($24000 in total) were allocated to 22 in-person participants from a total of 334 applications. Another 22 virtual participants received virtual registration subsidies, sponsored directly by ACL. $2,590 of the budget remaining after subsidies will be used for accessibility support (mostly closed captioning per attendees' request).

Student Volunteers. The Student Volunteer Chairs — Pedro Henrique Luz de Araujo and Eleonora Mancini — coordinated the recruitment and management of student volunteers, providing vital on-site and virtual support. The Chairs received 434 applications, recruited about 147 volunteers (137 in-person, 10 virtual) and allocated 105 grants.

Issues and future recommendations

TBC

Notes for future GCs

TBC

Useful links

  • ACL guidelines (Chair duties)
  • Proceedings
  • CL Github organization
    • to host any Github repositories relevant to any *ACL conference.
    • Contact the ACL Information Officer, Nitin Madnani (nmadnani@ets.org) to request access or to transfer existing repositories.
    • Used e.g., for conference website, creation of ACL anthology publications

Communication Tools

Slack

Using slack is a great way to keep track of each chair question/information/documents.

  • ACL has a paying account with Slack. Contact the ACL Information Officer, Nitin Madnani (nmadnani@ets.org) to create a slack channel for your conference
  • Ask Nitin to set up Slack with one channel per Chair + a general channel including everyone
  • Get all chairs to use Slack
  • The general channel will be useful when a given chair has a question whose answer is known by a different chair.

Contact emails

We used two contact emails (google group): one for PC related questions and one for all other questions.

Freshdesk

The conference attracts a lot of emails. Using Freshdesk and having Internal Communication chairs answering or routing incoming emails is a good idea! ACL has an account. Contact XXXX to set up Freshdesk for you.

Useful people

  • Nitin Madnani Chief Information Officer <nmadnani@ets.org>
    • to set up Slack
    • to get access to ACL git repo
  • Jennifer Rachford, ACL conference manager <Jennifer@ACLweb.org>
  • Chris Callison-Burch, ACL sponsorship chair <ccb@seas.upenn.edu>
  • Sudipta Kar and Freda Shi, to set up Freshdesk (email handling)
  • ARR people, submission sites (OpenReview) and reviewing process. Thamar Solorio <thamar.solorio@gmail.com>, Mausam <mausam@cs.washington.edu>
  • Openreview Harold Rubio <harold@openreview.net> for issues regarding how to produce proceedings from OpenReview data.
  • Ingestion of Proceedings in ACL Anthology: Matt Post <post@cs.jhu.edu>;

Submission platform

  • Main conference uses ARR and OpenReview
  • Others (workshop, demos, SRW) can use other platforms such as START
  • The contact for setting up OpenReview is <tech@aclrollingreview.org> and more generally the ARR people
  • In 2025, ACL still had a contract with START. Contact: Rich Gerber <rrgerber@softconf.com>

Website

  • Ask Nitin to create repo in https://github.com/acl-org/
  • Send request to website chairs for update
  • You can also directly update the git repo and issue a pull request

Publications (Proceedings)

Handbook

  • For budget and printing please talk to Jennifer Rachford, ACL Conference Manager

Virtual Infrastructure

  • Mainly handled by Underline and Whova
  • Interactions start about 2 months before the conference (regular weekly meeting starting -2M)
  • Underline people: "Damira Mrsic" <damira@underline.io>; "Sol Rosenberg" <sol@underline.io>;

Sponsorships

  • Mainly handled by Chris Callison-Burch, ACL Sponsorship officer
  • Connect Sponsorship chairs with him early
  • Sponsorship chair should also try to apply for funding from their own region
  • ACL has a Sponsorship Booklet

Fee waivers

Fee waivers are available for some e.g., each Tutorial will receive three (3) full conference registration. Contact Jennifer to know who can benefit from a fee waiver and how to proceed.

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