The ACL Computational Linguistics Doctoral Dissertation Award (short form: ACL Dissertation Award) was established by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) to recognize and promote outstanding research conducted by doctoral candidates in computational linguistics and natural language processing. This prestigious award is presented at the annual ACL conference and includes a monetary prize, as well as coverage of travel expenses for the recipient to attend the conference and deliver an oral presentation during a special session. The awardee also receives a certificate from the current President of ACL. Each year, there is one winner, with the possibility of several honorable mentions. The list of past awardees can be found here: https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/ACL_Dissertation_Award.
Nominations should be submitted by the candidate's PhD advisor. For the 2026 award, the deadline for nominations is December 15, 2025 (at 11.59 pm, AOE). Further details, including submission guidelines, can be found at this link (https://bit.ly/acl-dissertation-award-2026).