Call for Main Conference Papers

Overview
EMNLP 2026 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research on empirical methods for Natural Language Processing. EMNLP 2026 has a goal of curating a diverse technical program—in addition to traditional research results, papers may contribute negative findings, survey an area, announce the creation of a new resource, argue a position, report novel linguistic insights derived using existing computational techniques, and reproduce (or fail to reproduce) previous results. As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) and the Computational Linguistics (CL) journals.

Important Dates
ARR submission deadline (long & short papers) May 25, 2026
Reviewer registration deadline for ALL authors May 27, 2026
Author response and author-reviewer discussion July 7 - July 13, 2026
Meta review released July 30, 2026
EMNLP commitment deadline August 2, 2026
Notification of acceptance (long & short papers) August 20, 2026
Camera-ready papers due (long & short) September 20, 2026
Main Conference (dates for Workshops/Tutorials TBD) October 22 - 26, 2026
Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).

Following the ACL and ARR policies, there is no anonymity period requirement.

At the time of submission to ARR, authors will be asked to select a preferred venue (e.g., EMNLP 2026). This is used only to calculate acceptance rates. Authors who selected EMNLP 2026 as a preferred venue when submitting to ARR may choose not to commit to EMNLP 2026 after receiving their reviews, and authors who selected a preferred venue other than EMNLP 2026 when submitting to ARR are still welcome to commit to EMNLP 2026.

New: Paper Integrity Policies at EMNLP
There is growing concern in our community regarding unethical paper submissions that overwhelm community resources, including but not limited to, thinly sliced contributions, submissions with hallucinated citations, and entirely AI-generated papers (AI writing assistance is permitted). EMNLP will take actions against such submissions, as well as submissions that violate the ACL Policy on Publication Ethics. Such submissions may be desk rejected, and all authors involved in the submission may be ineligible to commit their paper(s) to EMNLP 2026 and EMNLP 2027.

Paper Submission Information
Dual submissions are not allowed! Please check the ARR Multiple Submission Policy for details. Papers must be submitted, at latest, by the ARR 2026 May cycle. Papers that have received reviews and a meta-review from ARR (whether from the ARR 2026 May cycle or an earlier ARR cycle) may be committed to EMNLP via the commitment link.

Mandatory Reviewing Workload
All authors are expected to sign up to review, or serve as an Area Chair or Senior Area Chair, with assignments subsequently based on qualifications. After submission, all authors must complete the author registration form by May 27, 2026 EoD AoE. If you receive assignments, your reviews must be completed by July 6, or your meta-reviews - by July 29. In case of any emergencies, the chairs should be warned via the emergency declaration form.

Highly irresponsible reviewers may be ineligible to (re-)submit or commit their work during the next ARR cycle. The submitting authors should (a) make sure that all other authors are aware of this policy, and (b) check that everybody on their team(s) submits their (meta-)reviews on time and in accordance with the guidelines. You can read additional details on the definition of highly irresponsible reviewers and the corresponding ARR policy here: https://aclrollingreview.org/incentives2025

AI Reviewing Experiment (opt-in)
The Program Committee plans on running an opt-in AI Reviewing Experiment to collect feedback from authors on the utility of AI Reviewers in the review process. The AI Reviews for opted-in submissions will not inform any part of the conference decision process. We will run this experiment under IRB approval, using open-weights models running on in-house compute resources, or closed models that guarantee zero-data retention.

Submission Topics
EMNLP 2026 aims to have a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

Clinical and Biomedical Applications
NLP and Code Models
Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Discourse and Pragmatics
Efficient Methods for NLP
Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
NLP and Symbolic Reasoning
Generation
Human-Centered NLP and Human-AI Interaction
Information Extraction
Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
Language Modeling
LLM Agents
LLM Security
Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics
Machine Learning for NLP
Machine Translation
Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP
Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
NLP Applications
Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation
Question Answering
Resources and Evaluation
Semantics: Lexical and Sentence-Level
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech and Spoken Language Understanding
Summarization
Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
Special Theme: New Missions for NLP Research
EMNLP 2026 Theme Track: New Missions for NLP Research
Large language models have rapidly shifted from research prototypes to widely used infrastructure. This new reality is changing the center of gravity of NLP research, and progress can no longer be measured only by fractional improvements in benchmark scores. When strong general-purpose models are increasingly available through open releases and commercial platforms, the field faces a more foundational question: What are the missions of NLP research now, and what kinds of contributions most advance that mission?

The EMNLP 2026 special theme invites papers that articulate, test, and advance visions for NLP in this era. We welcome work that reflects on the mission(s) of NLP research, reframes our collective research goals, proposes new evaluation and scientific methodologies, and builds bridges across multiple disciplines that can sharpen both our theories and our impact. Submissions may be empirical, theoretical, or position and survey papers, but should be grounded in clear claims, strong evidence, and actionable insights.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Rethinking progress and evaluation in NLP

For example, going beyond static leaderboards, including real-world impact, trustworthiness, robustness, and longitudinal behavior; what “generalization” should mean for humans vs models, and when models are reused, adapted, and deployed in diverse settings, etc.

• From models to systems and ecosystems

For example, how does system-level research on agentic workflows, tool use, and multi-model orchestration interface with human experiences; and at an ecosystem level, how do people, organizations, and communities use and interact with language technology.

• Scientific understanding of language and cognition

For example, using contemporary models as experimental instruments for psycholinguistics, cognitive science, language acquisition, and field linguistics; and what models reveal, and fail to reveal, about human cognition, the nature of language, learning, and meaning.

• Data as a bottleneck and a responsibility

For example, research on data scarcity and limits, contamination, and the consequences of synthetic data feedback loops, and new approaches to data creation, documentation, governance, and consent.

• LLMs as research tools: AI in research

For example, rigorous studies of how LLMs can support the research process in hypothesis generation, experiment design, analysis, and peer review support tools without eroding scientific standards.

This special theme is intended to complement the breadth of EMNLP, not narrow it. We encourage submissions that are ambitious in scope while remaining concrete in claims and methodology, and that help the community clarify what research looks like in the next chapter of NLP.

Two Stage Review: Submission to ARR, Commitment to EMNLP
EMNLP 2026 will use ACL Rolling Review (ARR) as a reviewing system, but final decisions will be made by the conference. Both submissions of articles for review and commitment of reviewed articles to the conference will be performed via the Open Review platform. Specifically, authors will follow a two-step process:

Authors submit articles to ARR, where submissions receive reviews and meta-reviews from ARR reviewers and action editors;
Authors commit their reviewed articles to a publication venue (e.g., EMNLP 2026), where Senior Area Chairs and Program Chairs make acceptance decisions from the ARR reviews and meta-reviews.
Authorship during commitment. During the commitment phase, it is not allowed to modify the author list (i.e., addition/deletion of authors is not allowed). However, modification of author order is possible.

EMNLP 2026 has chosen this approach in coordination with *CL 2026 conferences, which are adopting the same procedure and a coordinated submission plan to allow maximum flexibility during their submission periods for the authors. At each cycle, after a paper has been fully reviewed, authors have the option to commit their paper to a conference, or revise and resubmit for another round of reviews.

The reviewing process will continue to be double-blind. Reviewers will not see authors, nor will authors see reviewers and reviews on ARR will not be made publicly visible. However, authors will be given the option through ARR to make their anonymized submitted articles publicly visible.

Paper Submission Details
Both long and short paper submissions should follow all of the ARR submission requirements, including:

Long Papers (8 pages) and Short Papers (4 pages)
Instructions for Two-Way Anonymized Review
Authorship
Citation and Comparison
Multiple Submission Policy, Resubmission Policy, and Withdrawal Policy
ACL’s Publication Ethics Policy, and ARR’s Ethics Policy including the responsible NLP research checklist
ACL’s Disclosure Policy
Limitations
Writing Assistance
Paper Submission and Templates
Optional Supplementary Materials
Final versions of accepted papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages for long papers, up to 5 pages for short papers) to address reviewers’ comments.

Presentation at the Conference
All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings. The conference will include both in-person and virtual presentation options. Papers without at least one presenting author registered by the early registration deadline may be subject to rejection. Long and short papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between papers presented orally and papers presented as posters.

Contact Information
General Chair:

André Martins, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa
Program Chairs:

Sunipa Dev, Google
Desmond Elliott, University of Copenhagen
Hung-yi Lee, National Taiwan University
Jessy Li, The University of Texas at Austin
For questions related to paper submission, and the review process in general, email: editors@aclrollingreview.org

For questions about commitment and post review related topics, email: emnlp2026-programchairs@googlegroups.com