2026Q3 Reports: AACL

AACL-IJCNLP 2026

Conference Coordination Committee: The CCC for AACL-IJCNLP 2026 is chaired by Xuanjing Huang (Fudan, AACL Chair), with Maggie Wenjie Li (PolyU, AACL Chair-elect), Thepchai Supnithi (NECTEC, AACL Secretary), Lun-Wei Ku (Academia Sinica, AACL Conference Officer), Mark Dras (Macquarie, AACL Treasurer), and Min Zhang (HIT Shenzhen) as AFNLP representative.

Venue and Dates: AACL-IJCNLP 2026 will be held at Hengqin Tianmu Qintai Convention Center in Hengqin, Zhuhai, China, on November 6–10, 2026. The conference is organized by the University of Macau, in alignment with NLPCC 2026 to facilitate joint attendance. A site visit confirmed the venue capacity to accommodate over 1,000 participants based on IJCNLP-AACL 2025 statistics.

Conference Organization: The organizing committee has been finalized. Yue Zhang (Westlake University) serves as the General Chair. The Program Chairs are Ayu Purwarianti (Institut Teknologi Bandung), Tong Rong (Singapore Institute of Technology), Jun Suzuki (Tohoku University), and Ruifeng Xu (Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen). Derek F. Wong (University of Macau) serves as Local Chair. Workshop chairs have been recruited and joined the joint workshop selection process led by the ACL Workshop Officer.

ARR Integration and Phase 1 Commitment: AACL-IJCNLP 2026 uses the ARR May 2026 cycle, which is shared with EMNLP 2026. Following discussion among ACL Exec, ARR EiCs, EMNLP and AACL PCs, a one-time mutual-exclusivity policy was adopted for this cycle: authors must declare AACL or EMNLP as the target venue at submission time. Phase 1 commitment opens to ARR May submissions that explicitly select AACL 2026, with the AACL commitment deadline before the EMNLP notification (September 7, 2026).

Phase 1 Data and Phase 2 Plan: ARR May 2026 received 17,083 valid submissions with venue preference distribution: EMNLP 16,683 (97.7%), AACL 308 (1.8%), other ACL venues less than 1% combined. Given the limited Phase 1 volume, AACL plans to open a Phase 2 commitment after the EMNLP notification, accepting prior-cycle ARR submissions and EMNLP-rejected papers, in line with the original two-round strategy. The Phase 2 window will be coordinated with NAACL 2027 and COLING 2027 (both confirmed for the October 2026 ARR cycle) to avoid further reviewer overload.

Tutorials: The joint call for AACL and EMNLP tutorials has been completed, with 59 submissions received. The review process is underway via OpenReview and is scheduled to conclude on June 30. AACL-IJCNLP 2026 plans to accept 8 tutorials.

Workshops: AACL-IJCNLP 2026 has accepted 13 workshops, covering topics including multimodal and multilingual NLP, gender bias, LLM alignment, mental health, crisis response, audio safety, scholarly documents, RAG, agents, NL2SQL, and knowledge graphs. The workshops will be held on November 9–10, 2026. The workshop timeline is as follows: first call for papers on June 18; second call on July 8; third call on August 8; paper submission deadline on September 14; notification of acceptance on October 1; camera-ready papers due on October 12; and workshop proceedings deadline on October 15.

AFNLP and IJCNLP 2027

Coordination with AFNLP: Following the ACL Q3 2025 resolution authorizing AACL to negotiate independently with AFNLP, formal communication with AFNLP President Sadao Kurohashi was completed during Q2 2026. AACL and AFNLP confirmed continued collaboration through the IJCNLP-AACL series, with AACL-IJCNLP 2028 and IJCNLP-AACL 2029 envisaged as the next two joint editions.

IJCNLP 2027: Given that ACL 2027 is scheduled for Japan, AACL has expressed full support for ACL 2027 as the primary regional event and endorsed AFNLP's plan to organize an independent IJCNLP 2027, with Min Zhang serving as CCC Chair. AACL will coordinate scheduling and logistics with AFNLP as needed.

Community Engagement and Cross-Conference Contributions

ACL Chinese-Language Outreach: In coordination with ACL Publicity Director Sarvnaz Karimi, AACL helped establish an officially verified ACL account on Xiaohongshu (RedNote). The account, operated by a recommended student volunteer under ACL publicity guidelines, is intended to provide timely conference information and reduce miscommunication on Chinese social platforms. The verification was completed in Q2 2026 with support from the ACL Office, the Treasurer, and the President.