2026Q3 Reports: Ethics Committee Co-chairs

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Prior Reports: ['26 Q1] ['25 Q1] ['24 Q1]

N.B.: This document is authored expressly for the purpose of informing the ACL Executive Board as required for the Quarter 3 2026 documentation. It is meant to be read by the ACL Executive Board and is also suitable for the ACL membership and the general public.


The content of this page is work-in-progress as of 19 Jun 2026.


Overview

The purview of the ACL Ethics Committee (AEC) is to define a set of guidelines and processes for dealing with ethical concerns, coordinate with the *ACL event ethics chairs on ethical reviewing, and coordinate the creation and dissemination of resources on ethics (Source: ACLWeb).

Ethics Tutorial, Education and Outreach

The ethics committee has continued to engage in sharing information about ethics and ethics policies with the community. Some of the main actions conducted include the following:

  • Submitted a tutorial proposal for EMNLP '26 (Budapest, Hungary) and AACL-IJCNLP (Hengqin, China).
  • Working with past members to propose a special issue on ethics to be hosted by Computational Linguistics. This proposal has been accepted and the call for papers has been recently disseminated.
  • Held a Birds-of-a-Feather session at EACL '26.
  • Held a call with the ACL Exec's interested and available membership to ask about their wishes for AEC's work. We were charged with the creation of guidelines for appropriate use of AI for research.
  • Updating the [Ethics Committee Chairs Metadata at CL/NLP Conferences] webpage, and disseminating this through ACL conference officer and directly to known Ethics Chairs.
  • We were asked about Industrial Standards for Bias Mitigation by a recent past AEC member, but the details of this enquiry is currently stalled.

Social Impact Award

The AEC reached out to ACL* conference organizers to join the award committees of their social impact awards. AEC members were actively involved in award selection for EACL '26, ACL '26, and have agreements for EMNLP '26. This is expected to continue for future conferences.

AEC Logistics

We have legislated a clearer succession pattern for members and chairs, such that terms are shorter (to make it less onerous) and to stagger terms (so that the entire committee doesn't refresh at once and that there is overlap between senior members to mentor and set expectations for newly-onboarded members).

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