2026Q1 Reports: ACL 2026

Both Philipp Koehn, General Chair of ACL 2026, and I think everything of ACL 2026 organization seems to be going smoothly as these things go and no serious problems have surfaced. At present the reviewing process is in the meta review phase, so we don't know the number of papers etc. yet, and what that means for the local organization.

It should be noted that when inviting the Program Committee (PC) Chairs of ACL 2026, the ACL Policy was not clearly stated to them, which clearly stipulates that it is strongly recommended that the program co-chairs and their students seek alternative venues for publications, e.g. TACL, where the paper can still be presented at the respective conference without a COI (https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Conference_Conflict-of-interest_policy ). However, some PC Chairs insist on allowing their students to submit papers. To address this issue, with the approval of the ACL Executive Committee, a COI chair was specially appointed to specifically handle papers that may have conflicts of interest with PC Chairs. We do not wish to see such situations occur again in the organization of future ACL conferences, including EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, and AACL. The ACL Executive Committee has decided that all PC Chairs, when invited, should be explicitly informed of the ACL policy. Once they accept the invitation to serve as PC Chairs, they must adhere to the ACL policy without exception.