Describes the series’ typical recent cycle; last reviewed 2026-08-07. The official call is the authority on this year’s dates.
About the conference
ACL is the premier venue in natural language processing, and — in the LLM era — one of the most-watched conferences in all of computer science. Its sibling meetings EMNLP and NAACL share the community and the reviewing infrastructure.
Submission works differently from most fields: papers go to ACL Rolling Review (ARR), a continuous reviewing pool with roughly monthly-to-cyclical deadlines, and authors then "commit" reviewed papers to a specific conference by its commitment deadline. For the main summer meeting, the relevant ARR cycle has recently fallen around February — but the ARR calendar, not a single conference deadline, is what to track.
Frequently asked questions
How do ACL deadlines work?
Submit to an ACL Rolling Review cycle (deadlines recur through the year), receive reviews, then commit the reviewed paper to ACL, EMNLP, or NAACL by that conference’s commitment deadline. The ARR site publishes the current cycle calendar.
What are the Findings of ACL?
A second acceptance tier: papers judged solid but not selected for the main proceedings are published as "Findings", citable and indexed, without a main-conference talk slot. It substantially raises the effective acceptance rate for sound work.