2026Q3 Reports: Sponsorship Director
This report covers the sponsorship landscape for the four 2026 ACL conferences (EACL 2026, ACL 2026, EMNLP 2026, and AACL-IJCNLP 2026), following on from the previous Sponsorship Director report (2025 Q1). This is the first report by Joel Tetreault since assuming the role January 2026 from the prior director, Chris Callison-Burch (who served the first three terms of this position).
Duties of the Sponsorship Director
The responsibilities of the Sponsorship Director are:
- Coordinate with the ACL Business Manager to set the sponsorship rates for the conferences, and benefits for each sponsorship level
- Contact recurring sponsors to solicit sponsorship of upcoming conferences.
- Maintain an organized list of current sponsors and of potential sponsorship leads
- Help recruit new sponsors to the conference
- Invoice sponsors once they have picked a sponsorship level, and decided which conferences to sponsor
- Coordinate with the general chairs of the conferences to let them know about sponsor benefits like exhibition space
- Coordinate the efforts of the conference sponsorship chairs
- Liaising between sponsors and relevant conference organizers in order to ensure that we give the sponsors the promised benefits
The sponsorship committee for each year consists of:
- ACL Sponsorship Director
- ACL Business Manager(s)
- 2 Sponsorship Chairs for each conference, appointed by the general chair in consultation with their respective organizing committees
- Assistant to assist with invoicing
For future sponsorship directors I recommend:
- Hire an assistant to help with invoicing
- Coordinate with the ACL Business Manager and ACL Treasurer to ability to view bank account, so that you and your assistant can verify when sponsors have paid their invoices.
- Create a standard contract for sponsors. Currently we don't have a contact, but several sponsors need one, so we have them draft one. It might be more efficient if we just have a simple contract that we can offer up to them.
- In order to help manage the invoices, I asked permission from both the ACL Treasurer and my own university department to hire my admin at the University of Pennsylvania to help with issuing the invoices. Her name and email is Lily Hoot <lhoot@seas.upenn.edu>. She has been serving in the role for longer than a year, and has been quite valuable in handling the invoicing duties. We will bill the ACL $40/hour for her time to reimburse the University for time taken away from her normal responsibilities. I recommend that the ACL Exec budget for administrative help for future Sponsorship Directors as well.
Recent Developments
- Updated scope of work for the sponsorship committee
- Lily Hoot hired on to handle invoicing duties
Current Sponsors for 2026 Conferences
Sponsor lists below were pulled from each conference's public sponsors page on July 1, 2026. EACL 2026's sponsorship deadline (Feb 6, 2026) has passed, so its list is effectively final. ACL 2026 is largely filled out. EMNLP 2026's sponsorship deadline is September 11, 2026, so its list is still growing, and AACL-IJCNLP 2026 has not opened its sponsor roster yet — both are snapshots, not final counts.
EACL 2026
| Tier | Sponsors |
|---|---|
| Platinum | Megagon Labs, Appen, Oracle |
| Bronze | ELRA, Translated, Orange, Rise Data Labs |
- Total: 7 sponsors across 2 tiers (no Diamond, Gold, or Silver tier sponsors this cycle).
- Sponsorship Chairs: Laurent Besacier and Yassine Benajiba.
- Location: Rabat, Morocco
ACL 2026
| Tier | Sponsors |
|---|---|
| Diamond | Bloomberg, Capital One, Alibaba Cloud |
| Platinum | Megagon Labs, Appen, Meta, Oracle, Apple, Baidu, Tencent, Ant Group, Google, Snowflake, Zhongguancun Academy, Abaka AI |
| Gold | Chen Institute, JP Morgan Chase, Speak, StepFun |
| Silver | Adobe |
| Bronze | Translated, NatWest Group, ARC, Babelscape, DATAmundi, NEC |
| Academic Ally | Apple, University of Washington |
- Total: 28 sponsor slots (27 unique organizations – Apple appears in both Platinum and Academic Ally). ACL 2026 is by far the largest sponsorship program of the four 2026 conferences.
- Sponsorship Chairs: Baotian Hu and Steve Richardson.
- Location: San Diego, USA
EMNLP 2026
| Tier | Sponsors |
|---|---|
| Diamond | Bloomberg, Google |
| Platinum | Megagon Labs, Oracle, Apple, Baidu, Capital One, Cohere |
| Gold | JP Morgan Chase |
| Silver | Adobe |
| Bronze | Translated, DataOcean AI, Booking.com |
| Academic Ally | Apple |
- Total (as of July 1, 2026): 14 sponsor slots (13 unique organizations). With the sponsorship deadline still two months out (Sept 11, 2026), this total should grow before the final report.
- Sponsorship Chairs: Nikos Aletras and Matthias Gallé
- Location: Budapest, Hungary
AACL-IJCNLP 2026
| Tier | Sponsors |
|---|---|
| Platinum | Baidu |
- Total (as of July 1, 2026): 1 sponsor. With the sponsorship deadline over two months away, this total should grow before the final report.
- Sponsorship Chairs: Yan Song and Yuanhe Tian
- Location: Hengqin, China
Sponsorship volume by conference (2026)
| Conference | Sponsor slots | Tiers filled |
|---|---|---|
| EACL 2026 | 7 | 2 (Platinum, Bronze) |
| ACL 2026 | 28 | 6 (Diamond–Bronze, Academic Ally) |
| EMNLP 2026 | 14 | 6 (Diamond–Bronze, Academic Ally) |
| AACL-IJCNLP 2026 | 0 | None yet |
| NAACL 2026 | N/A | Not running this cycle |
| Total | 49 |
Patterns and Statistics
Sponsors per conference, 2021–2026
Pulling sponsor counts from each conference's own site (and, for 2021–2024, ACL's internal Sponsorship Director reports) shows the broader trend line behind this year's snapshot (values are unique sponsoring organizations per conference-year):
| Year | EACL | ACL | EMNLP | AACL-IJCNLP | NAACL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 11 | 29 | 22 | N/A1 | 15 |
| 2022 | N/A1 | 26 | 28 | 62 | 30 |
| 2023 | 7 | 31 | 31 | 8 | N/A1 |
| 2024 | 6 | 25 | 23 | N/A3 | 12 |
| 2025 | N/A1 | 32 | 30 | 20 | 8 |
| 2026* | 7 | 27 | 13* | 0* | N/A1 |
*2026 EMNLP and AACL-IJCNLP figures are still growing (deadlines not yet passed). EMNLP 2021's live sponsors page no longer exists (2021.emnlp.org now 404s), so that figure is drawn from the EMNLP 2021 handbook's sponsor acknowledgments, which lists: Diamond – Apple, Bloomberg, Facebook AI, Google; Platinum – Amazon, Baidu, ByteDance, DeepMind, G Research, Megagon; Gold – Grammarly, Microsoft; Silver – Duolingo, Naver, Naver Labs Europe; Bronze – Adobe, Babelscape, HLTCOE, LegalForce; Supporter – ServiceNow; D&I Ally – Morgan Stanley; D&I Contributor – Adobe, IBM (22 unique orgs total). (1) No conference ran that year: EACL skipped 2022 and 2025; NAACL skipped 2023 and 2026 (its site for 2026 does not exist); no standalone AACL-IJCNLP event in 2021. (2) 2022's Asia-Pacific chapter event ran as a smaller standalone "AACL 2022," distinct from the joint "IJCNLP-AACL" branding used in 2023, 2025, and 2026. (3) AACL-IJCNLP was folded into ACL 2024 rather than running as a standalone event that year.
A chart image (sponsors_2023_2026_chart.png, grouped bar chart of the table above, now covering 2021–2026 and all five conferences) is included alongside this draft — upload it to the wiki and embed with:
[[File:sponsors_2023_2026_chart.png|thumb|center|700px|Sponsors per Conference, 2021–2026]]
Key takeaways from the trend:
- ACL is consistently the largest program (25–32 unique sponsors/year) and has held that lead every year since 2021.
- NAACL had a strong showing in 2021–2022 (15, then a high of 30) but has shrunk sharply since — 12 in 2024 and just 8 in 2025 — and isn't running at all in 2026.
- EMNLP tracked closely with ACL through 2021–2025 (22–31 sponsors) but is well behind pace for 2026 (13 so far) — worth watching given its Sept. 11 deadline is still open.
- EACL is a much smaller, steady program (6–11 sponsors most years) and simply didn't run in 2022 or 2025.
- AACL-IJCNLP is the most volatile: a small standalone AACL event in 2022 (6), 8 sponsors in 2023 (as IJCNLP-AACL), folded into ACL in 2024, a strong 20 in 2025, and 0 so far in 2026 — likely just early in its own solicitation cycle rather than a real decline.
- Adding NAACL changes the overall shape of the picture: 2022 (with NAACL at 30 sponsors) was arguably ACL's broadest sponsorship year of the six, not 2025 — NAACL's steady decline is one of the more notable trends in this whole dataset and may be worth flagging to the ACL Exec.
ACL sponsorship levels, 2021–2026
Counts below are the number of sponsors literally listed under each tier heading on the ACL sponsors page each year (a sponsor listed in two tiers, e.g. an Academic Ally that is also a paid tier sponsor, is counted once per tier).
| Tier | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diamond | 41 | 6 | 72 | 5 | 10 | 3 |
| Platinum | 8 | 8 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 12 |
| Gold | 2 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 4 |
| Silver | 3 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| Bronze | 51 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 6 |
| Standard tiers total | 22 | 26 | 30 | 25 | 33 | 26 |
| Other / special recognitions3 | 7 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 2 | 2 |
| Total unique sponsors | 29 | 26 | 31 | 25 | 32 | 27 |
Notes: figures for 2021–2024 are drawn from ACL's own internal Sponsorship Director reports on the admin wiki (more reliable than the archived web pages, which had some rendering/categorization quirks); 2025–2026 are drawn directly from the live sponsors pages. (1) 2021's published sponsor page listed a few additional names under Diamond/Bronze/"Supporter" (e.g., TCEB, the Bangkok convention and exhibition bureau, plus a handful of local Thai partners) that ACL's own internal report excluded from its official count of 22 sponsors; those are folded into "Other / special recognitions" here for consistency with that internal report. (2) 2023 also had a one-off "Diamond-Level Welcome Event" sponsor (Cohere), a top tier since discontinued. "Other / special recognitions" covers non-tier categories that vary by year: D&I Champion/Ally (most years), a "Supporter" tier and local partners (2021), Local Sponsors (2024 only, 6 regional partners), Destination Partner (2025 only), and Academic Ally (2026 only) — excluded from "Total unique sponsors" where they don't represent a paying industry sponsor distinct from the tiers above.
- Diamond has ranged from 3 to 10 sponsors with no clear trend: 4 (2021) → 6 (2022) → 7 (2023) → 5 (2024) → 10 (2025) → 3 (2026).
- Platinum is the most stable tier: 8 sponsors in 2021–2022, then 10 for three straight years (2023–2025), before jumping to 12 in 2026.
- Gold roughly tripled from 2021 (2) to 2022 (6) and has stayed in the 3–6 range since.
- Despite all the tier-level movement, Total unique sponsors has stayed in a fairly narrow band (25–32) across all six years — ACL's overall sponsor base size looks stable even as which companies sit in which tier shifts substantially.
- 2026's Diamond count (3) is the smallest of the six years — Apple, Google, and Meta, all Diamond sponsors in at least one prior year, are Platinum this cycle instead.
Cross-conference sponsors (2026)
Of the 33 distinct organizations sponsoring at least one 2026 conference, most sponsor only one event. A smaller "core" group spans two or all three of EACL/ACL/EMNLP — useful to track since these are ACL's most committed, multi-conference sponsors (AACL-IJCNLP has no 2026 sponsors yet, so it isn't part of this overlap):
| Coverage | Count | Organizations |
|---|---|---|
| All 3 conferences | 3 orgs | Megagon Labs, Oracle, Translated |
| 2 of 3 conferences | 8 orgs | Adobe, Appen, Apple, Baidu, Bloomberg, Capital One, Google, JP Morgan Chase |
| 1 conference only | 22 orgs | Remaining sponsors, including most Bronze/Academic Ally entries and several first-time names this cycle (see below) |
Note: Appen sponsors EACL + ACL but not (yet) EMNLP; the other seven double-sponsors pair ACL with EMNLP but skip EACL — consistent with EACL historically being the smallest of the three programs.
Notable trends vs. prior cycles
- Growth at EACL: 7 sponsors this cycle vs. 6 for EACL 2024 and 7 for EACL 2023 — essentially flat over time, with 2025 skipped entirely.
- Growth at ACL: 28 sponsor slots (27 unique) vs. 25 unique for ACL 2024 and 32 for ACL 2025 — 2026 is in line with the recent range, not a new high. The composition of the Diamond tier has shifted: Apple, Google/Google DeepMind, LG AI Research, Meta, and NewsBreak/Citadel/Xiaomi have rotated in and out of Diamond each year; for 2026, only Bloomberg, Capital One, and Alibaba Cloud hold Diamond, with Apple, Google, and Meta moving down to Platinum.
- EMNLP looks lighter so far (13 vs. 23–31 in 2023–2025), but its deadline hasn't passed yet — not a like-for-like comparison until closer to September.
- AACL-IJCNLP 2026 currently has zero listed sponsors, versus 20 for the 2025 edition — likely a timing artifact this early in the cycle, but worth flagging for active outreach given the strong 2025 baseline.
- Rise of China-based tech/AI sponsors: Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Tencent, Zhongguancun Academy, Abaka AI, and StepFun all appear in the ACL 2026 sponsor list — six organizations, continuing a trend visible since 2023 (Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, Huawei, Tencent have appeared most years).
- New sponsor names this cycle (not seen in 2023–2025 lists reviewed): Zhongguancun Academy, Speak, StepFun, ARC, DATAmundi, Rise Data Labs, Orange, ELRA, and Booking.com — a healthy number of new entrants alongside the recurring "core" sponsors.
- NAACL is absent from the 2026 cycle entirely (its 2026 conference site doesn't exist), continuing a decline from a 2022 high of 30 sponsors to 12 (2024) to 8 (2025) to none in 2026 — worth confirming with Joel whether this is a scheduling gap (NAACL is not annual) or a deliberate pause.