2026Q3 Reports: Workshop Officer

Workshop officers’ report

In the 2026 workshop cycle, we received 167 workshop submissions across two calls for proposals: a first call for EACL and ACL (with 116 submissions) and a second for AACL and EMNLP (51 submissions). The number of submissions slightly increased from the previous year (139), though a handful were resubmitted to the second call. After review, 13 workshops have been allocated to EACL, with 8 allocated a half-day slot; 30 to ACL, with 9 allocated a half-day slot; 14 to AACL; and 26 to EMNLP. This means that of 167 workshop proposals, 83 (49.7%) were accepted in some form. As in 2025, the scale of proposals remains an issue for the limited space available for workshops at each conference venue, despite efforts to include as many workshops as possible through suggested merges and half-day slots. Below, we outline the issues that have emerged during the 2026 cycle and potential solutions.

Workshop colocation preferences and updated preferences policy

As in prior years, some workshop organizers expressed dissatisfaction with the conference they were allocated to. While this usually occurs for a handful of workshops in every cycle, a significantly larger cohort requested to be moved from AACL to EMNLP, and multiple workshops eventually withdrew over this assignment. While in some cases these withdrawals may be due to logistical issues, the current submission form only requests venue preferences and does not allow us to systematically account for these constraints when allocating workshops.

In light of this, we propose a new policy for stating conference co-location preferences and constraints for workshops submitted to the 2027 cycle. Specifically, we will request that submissions list both their preferred venues to be co-located with and a new field listing any incompatible venues they cannot be held at. The goal of this policy is to (1) minimize the number of withdrawn workshops and (2) better match workshops to conferences, providing a better workshop agenda for each venue. Since organizers are given the opportunity to state which workshops are incompatible prior to submission, withdrawals of workshops after acceptance due to venue location will now result in a one-year submission ban for all organizers.

Number of Calls

Unlike prior years, in the 2026 cycle we held two calls for workshop submissions. This was chosen due to the early dates for EACL (March 24-29) this cycle, as well as limited information on the location and dates for AACL and EMNLP. Because of this, holding two calls allowed us to provide more organizational time for workshops co-located with EACL and to avoid requiring workshops to commit to being located at AACL or EMNLP without knowing when or where the event would be.

However, holding two calls introduced other issues to the workshop selection and allocation process. We received significantly more submissions to the first call than the second. Since the review committee did not know how many workshops would be submitted to the second call or how many workshops would be accepted, we made many decisions to include as many workshops at EACL and ACL as possible from this pool (half-day slots, merging workshops). This led to fewer workshops being included overall at the conferences covered by this second call.

For the 2027 cycle, the EMNLP organizers have requested that we go back to a single call and have stated that they will select workshop chairs and provide more information about the venue earlier in the process. We are currently preparing a joint call for five conferences in 2027 (EACL, COLING, NAACL, ACL, and EMNLP), assuming we will have more information about EMNLP before the call is released.