The ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award recognizes up to four papers for their long-lasting impact on the field of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics: two papers from 25 years earlier, and two papers from 10 years earlier.
The winner of the 2001 Test-of-Time Paper Award is:
John Hale. 2001. A Probabilistic Earley Parser as a Psycholinguistic Model. In Second Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
https://aclanthology.org/N01-1021/
The 2026 winners of the 2016 Test-of-Time Paper Award are:
1. Rico Sennrich, Barry Haddow, and Alexandra Birch. 2016. Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1715–1725, Berlin, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
https://aclanthology.org/P16-1162/
2. Pranav Rajpurkar, Jian Zhang, Konstantin Lopyrev, and Percy Liang. 2016. SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2383–2392, Austin, Texas. Association for Computational Linguistics.
https://aclanthology.org/D16-1264/
3. Zeerak Waseem and Dirk Hovy. 2016. Hateful Symbols or Hateful People? Predictive Features for Hate Speech Detection on Twitter. In Proceedings of the NAACL Student Research Workshop, pages 88–93, San Diego, California. Association for Computational Linguistics.
https://aclanthology.org/N16-2013/
The winners were announced at ACL 2026. Congratulations to all the winners!
CL Test-of-Time Paper Award Nomination Committee:
Co-chairs: Michael Strube, Xiaojun Wan
Rada Mihalcea, Alexander Koller, Thamar Solorio, Yusuke Miyao, Wei Lu, Derek F. Wong, Barbara Di Eugenio, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Massimo Poesio