2025Q3 Minutes

ACL Executive Committee Meeting Minutes (Q3 2025)

Meeting Overview

• Meeting Date & Time: July 27, 2025, 9:00–17:25 (CET)
• Venue: Level 2 Room 2.96, Austria Center Vienna
• Participants: ACL Executive Committee (EC) Members, ACL Business Manager (Jenn Rachford), Conference General Chairs / Program Chairs (ACL 2025 and ACL 2026), Workshop Officers (Terra Blevins), Anthology Director (Matt Post)

Key Discussions

Conference Organization

1. Future ACL conference organization:
   • Align VP-elect responsibilities with their regional affiliation (e.g., VP-elect from Asia-Pacific leads conferences in Asia-Pacific; VP-elect from Europe/Middle-East/Africa leads conferences in Europe/Middle-East/Africa; VP-elect from North America/South America leads conferences in North America/South America).
2. ACL 2025 Organization:
   • Finalized pre-conference logistics, 6329 registrations (hybrid: 5359 in-person, 970 virtual).
3. EMNLP 2025 organization:
   • The local PCO, MCI, is partnering with BaiLu (a corporate entity) to apply for the government permit approval.
   • Visa information: Many countries qualify for a 10-day transit visa, 30-entry visa, or L-tourist visa. However, countries such as India, Pakistan, Israel, and several Middle Eastern nations will require F visas. Participants have been advised to avoid non-refundable hotel bookings until approval is confirmed.
   • Next steps: The organizing team will update the EC on Suzhou approval by July 30.
4. ACL 2026 Preparation:
   • Confirmed at the time of the meeting for July 2–7 in San Diego, CA, USA, held at the Hyatt Grand Manchester.
   • PC Co-Chairs will develop AC training materials by December 2025.
5. EACL 2026 Preparation:
   • ACL Business Manager worked with LREC leadership to confirm dates to announce Rabat, Morocco in March 2026. Just need to finalize the contract but are confident to announce while in Vienna for ACL 2025. GC & PC identified and are meeting onsite at ACL 2025 for planning.
6. Virtual Conference Participation:
   • The EC approved funding for a new virtual platform pilot in 2026.

ARR and Paper Review

• Agreed to develop a cross-venue database to track reviewer quality (e.g., timeliness, feedback depth) and share anonymized data with ACL conferences to improve reviewer selection.
• Approved launching the award to incentivize high-quality reviews; recipients will receive a certificate and discounted registration for the next ACL conference.
• Agreed to establish minimum criteria for Area Chairs (ACs): ≥3 peer-reviewed publications in ACL venues and 1+ year of reviewer experience. Graduate students with <2 publications will no longer be eligible.
• Mandated pre-conference AC training (led by PC Co-Chairs) to standardize review guidelines.

PEC Process

• Clarified the appeal rights and timeline for authors whose papers are flagged for ethical issues (e.g., plagiarism, data misconduct).
• Agreed to invite PEC Co-Chairs to future EC meetings to align on revision standards and appeal workflows.

CL Journals

• CL Editor Wei Lu proposed joint webinars to promote cross-disciplinary research; the first webinar (on "CL for Multimodal AI") will be held in October 2025.
• Planned to expand the TACL editorial board to reduce reviewer burden.
• Explored potential collaborations among CL journals to avoid duplicate submissions.

Workshops

• Agreed to release two calls for workshops annually to balance demand.
• Developed separate evaluation criteria (e.g., past attendance, paper submissions) to avoid automatic acceptance of longstanding workshops; workshops running for ≥5 years must submit annual impact reports.
• Approved virtual workshops only for regions with travel barriers (e.g., Ukrainian NLP workshop 2025); virtual workshops will use ACL’s Anthology platform for materials.
• Adopted SIGLEX’s proposal to allocate 10% of workshop slots to underrepresented topics (e.g., low-resource languages).

SIGs

• Finalized a code of ethics for SIGs (e.g., conflict of interest disclosure, inclusive event planning) to be enforced by 2026.
• Identified 3 SIGs with <1 event/year; the EC will send a 6-month notice to improve activity or face dissolution.
• Next steps: Distribute the finalized SIG ethical policy to all SIG leaders by August 2025; host a training webinar in September 2025.

Anthology Representation & Scientific Indexing

• Verified ORCID will be mandatory for authors in future submissions (with exceptions for accessibility issues), and "verified/unverified" author pages will be created to avoid misattribution.
• Planned to get Findings indexed in Web of Science/Scopus.
• Next steps: Launch a campaign to promote ORCID registration among authors by September 2025; implement mandatory ORCID for ACL 2026 submissions; assign a dedicated lead to follow up with Web of Science/Scopus for Findings indexing by October 2025 and submit applications by Q1 2026.

Financial Planning Measures

• Explored initiatives to reduce student attendees’ financial burden (e.g., discounted registration fees, travel grants, virtual participation subsidies).
• Reviewed surplus distribution rules for joint conferences between ACL chapters.
• Addressed the 2021 ACL-IJCLP Virtual Conference surplus.

Approved 3 Resolutions

• Resolution 1: Regional Alignment of VP-Elect Conference Responsibilities
  • ACL VP-elects shall oversee conference organization and venue selection exclusively in the regions of their affiliations.
  • Effective from ACL 2027 (i.e., the VP-elect taking office in 2026 will oversee ACL 2027).

• Resolution 2: Surplus Distribution for the 2021 ACL-IJCLP Virtual Conference
  • Allocate 25% of the 2021 ACL-IJCLP Virtual Conference surplus (approximately USD 104,000) to AFNLP.

• Resolution 3: 2027 ACL Conference Branding & AFNLP Cooperation
  • The 2027 ACL conference will be branded as "ACL 2027" (no co-branding with IJCLP/AFNLP).
  • Terminate financial sharing between ACL main conferences and AFNLP for future events.
  • Empower AACL to independently negotiate its cooperation model with AFNLP (e.g., co-branding, workshop collaboration) via AACL’s governance process.