The ACL 2019 conference invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) journal.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline (long & short papers): March 4
Notification of acceptance: May 13
Camera-ready due: June 3
Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth").

SUBMISSIONS

ACL 2019 has the goal of a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):

Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Discourse and Pragmatics
Document Analysis
Generation
Information Extraction and Text Mining
Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
Machine Learning
Machine Translation
Multidisciplinary
Multilinguality
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
Question Answering
Resources and Evaluation
Sentence-level semantics
Sentiment Analysis and Argument Mining
Social Media
Summarization
Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing
Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics
Vision, Robotics, Multimodal, Grounding and Speech
Word-level Semantics
Long Papers

Long ACL 2019 submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Review forms will be made available prior to the deadlines.

Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account.

Long papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between long papers presented orally and as posters.

Short Papers

ACL 2019 also solicits short papers. Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of short papers are:

A small, focused contribution
Work in progress
A negative result
An opinion piece
An interesting application nugget
Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers' comments in their final versions.

Short papers will be presented in one or more oral or poster sessions. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented orally and as posters.

ANONYMITY AND SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

As the reviewing will be blind, papers must not include authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers. For example, do not omit or redact important citation information to preserve anonymity. Instead, use third person or named reference to this work, as described above (“Smith showed” rather than “we showed”).

Papers may be accompanied by a resource (software and/or data) described in the paper. Papers that are submitted with accompanying software/data may receive additional credit toward the overall evaluation, and the potential impact of the software and data will be taken into account when making the acceptance/rejection decisions.

ACL 2019 also encourages the submission of supplementary material to report preprocessing decisions, model parameters, and other details necessary for the replication of the experiments reported in the paper. Seemingly small preprocessing decisions can sometimes make a large difference in performance, so it is crucial to record such decisions to precisely characterize state-of-the-art methods.

Nonetheless, supplementary material should be supplementary (rather than central) to the paper. It may include explanations or details of proofs or derivations that do not fit into the paper, lists of features or feature templates, sample inputs and outputs for a system, pseudo-code or source code, and data. The paper should not rely on the supplementary material: while the paper may refer to and cite the supplementary material and the supplementary material will be available to reviewers, they will not be asked to review or even download the supplementary material. Authors should refer to the contents of the supplementary material in the paper submission, so that reviewers interested in these supplementary details will know where to look.

PAPER SUBMISSION AND TEMPLATES

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system. The submission site will be announced shortly.

Long/short paper submissions must use the official ACL 2019 style templates. Long papers must not exceed eight (8) pages of content. Short papers must not exceed four (4) pages of content. References do not count against these limits.

Note: The supplementary material does not count towards page limit and should not be included in paper, but should be submitted separately using the appropriate field on the submission website.

All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in the template files that will become available on the conference website shortly.

MULTIPLE SUBMISSION POLICY

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time in the START submission form, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted by ACL 2019. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at ACL 2019 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented. We will not accept for publication or presentation the papers that overlap significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere.

Authors submitting more than one paper to ACL 2019 must ensure that submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.

ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES

ACL 2019 adopts the following ACL guidelines for submission and citation. Submissions that do not conform to these guidelines will be rejected without review.

Preserving Double Blind Review

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up (starting February 4, 2019) to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you may consider submitting your work to the Computational Linguistics journal, which does not require anonymization and has a track for "short" (i.e., conference-length) papers.

Citation and Comparison

If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:

You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited).

In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.

Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

For more information, see the ACL Policies for Submission, Review, and Citation: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/new-policies-submission-review-and-citation

PRESENTATION REQUIREMENT

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for ACL 2019 by the early registration deadline.

CONTACT INFORMATION

General chair:
Lluís Màrquez - Amazon

Program co-chairs:
Anna Korhonen - University of Cambridge
David Traum - University of Southern California

Email:
acl2019pc@gmail.com