Frequently Asked Questions

Other information about the ACL Anthology

• How can I submit corrections to papers?

  For corrections to metadata only (meaning that no change to the PDF is required), please file a Github issue. Be sure to indicate the Anthology ID of the paper (e.g., P19-1017). Metadata changes are generally accepted if they comport with the PDF, which we take as authoritative.

  If you need to make changes to the content, the Anthology can process either an erratum or a revision. More information on this can be found here. In short, you will use this Microsoft Form. Please note the following:

  • The PDF you submit needs to be retrievable via wget.
  • You need to provide a summary of the changes. This summary will be included in the Anthology, and should be written from a neutral, scientific perspective.

  These conditions help us to process corrections more quickly. We will do our best to process corrections within six weeks, but do not make guarantees as to the processing time. Submissions not meeting these standards will be rejected, potentially without notice.

• How do I link to publications in the ACL Anthology?

  Every paper in the Anthology is assigned an Anthology ID. Prior to 2020, this identifier took the form CYY-VPPP or CYY-VVPP, where C is a collection, YY a two-digit year, V a volume, and P a paper ID. The canonical URL of an Anthology paper is given by appending this identifier to the Anthology’s base URL https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/; e.g., https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E91-1001. This is the paper’s landing page, which includes (among other things) a link to the PDF.

  Many papers in the Anthology also have Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Both the DOIs and the canonical Anthology URLs embed the 8-character ACL Anthology Identifier. When available, DOI URLs will redirect to the Anthology canonical URL, and will be listed on that page.

  Variations of the canonical URL can be used to access the PDF and citation format files directly:

  • Append .pdf to get the PDF, e.g., https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E91-1001.pdf
  • Append .bib to retrieve the BibTeX file, e.g., https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E91-1001.bib
  • Append .xml to get the MODS-formatted XML file, e.g., https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E91-1001.xml

  and so on.

• How can I submit attachments to papers?

  To submit paper attachments, use this Microsoft form. Important: If the file attachment cannot be downloaded automatically (via wget), processing of your attachment will fail. Many sharing sites (Github, Google Drive, Dropbox) display by default an HTML page. This complicates processing of attachments and increases the time it takes. Please manually check that you can download your file via wget.

  Attachments are processed at least quarterly, at the beginning of January, April, July, and October. We often also process a week or so after major *ACL conferences. Additional processing is undertaken as volunteer time permits.

• How can I submit my proceedings or journal to the Anthology?

  Please see our submission guide.

• How does the ACL Anthology use Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)?

  The ACL uses DOIs to refer to scholarly works persistently in accordance with cross-disciplinary standards. Prior to 2012, ACL materials were assigned DOIs by the Association of Computational Machinery (ACM). Since 2014, ACL has assigned its own DOIs to materials using a convention based off of the ACL Anthology Identifiers. In 2015, ACL had to change DOI prefix due to accounting practices for the ACM.

  Prefixes:

  • 2014–2015: 10.3115
  • 2015–current: 10.18653

  We strongly encourage the publication of DOIs in citing bibliographies to help better cross-reference ACL materials.

  Note while the ACL Anthology hosts third-party materials coming from sister societies, these materials are hosted courtesy the ACL but are not assigned DOIs by the ACL due to costs and copyright limitations; the DOI information above is only applicable to ACL sponsored events by ACL, its chapters or SIGs.

• What is the copyright for materials in the ACL Anthology?

  The ACL materials that are hosted in the Anthology are licensed to the general public under a liberal usage policy that allows unlimited reproduction, distribution and hosting of materials on any other website or medium, for non-commercial purposes. Prior to 2016, all ACL materials are licensed using the Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike) license. As of 2016, this policy has been relaxed further, and all subsequent materials are available to the general public on the terms of the Creative Commons 4.0 BY (Attribution) license; this means both commercial and non-commercial use is explicitly licensed to all.

  Note that these policies only cover ACL materials. As with the DOIs, this policy does not cover third-party materials. For reproduction privileges for such materials, please approach the respective organizations.

• How can I help improve the ACL Anthology?

  We welcome your contributions! In fact, since the Anthology is run entirely on volunteer energy, we need them. The best way to contribute is to browse our Github issues page (we suggest starting with the “help wanted” tag, and see what needs to be done that overlaps with your interests or skills. Please also feel free to email the director, anthology@aclweb.org. You might also be interested in our call for volunteers.

• What other resources are there based on the ACL Anthology?

  The ACL Anthology Reference Corpus provides plain text and other metadata for a controlled subset of the ACL Anthology.

  The following people have written reflections on the ACL Anthology:

  • Aravind Joshi
  • Karen Spärck Jones

  A 2018 paper gave a technical description of the Anthology at the time:

  The ACL Anthology: Current State and Future Directions Daniel Gildea, Min-Yen Kan, Nitin Madnani, Christoph Teichmann, Martin Villalba Proceedings of Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (NLP-OSS)

  It is now out of date, but helped direct changes to the Anthology that occurred in 2019.

  Many other publications based on the ACL Anthology exist.

• What software does the ACL Anthology use?

  The ACL Anthology is built using completely open-source software, with further developments and customization done by the ACL Anthology staff. The current Anthology website is statically generated using the Hugo framework, with the layout being designed using the Bootstrap library. Font Awesome is used as the icon font.

  The source code for the Anthology is available on GitHub at https://github.com/acl-org/acl-anthology/.

• How can I programmatically access the Anthology's data?

  Please see our developer documentation.