Information for Submitters
General information for submitting proceedings to the ACL Anthology (for event chairs)
August 26, 2025
This page contains general information about submitting proceedings of a conference to the ACL Anthology. It is intended for publication chairs of main conferences and standalone events, who have the responsibility of delivering the proceedings for all main conference and workshop volumes to the Anthology director. Chairs of workshops attached to a larger conference should also read this page, but should work through their main conference publication chair instead of directly with the Anthology.
Please note that this document does not describe how to manage the submissions and review process, or even how to assemble proceedings from accepted papers. For complete information about the conference management process, especially for ACL conference publication chairs, please see our official documentation. That document focuses on Softconf for conference management and ACLPUB (which is integrated into Softconf) for proceedings generation. More recently, ACL has moved to using OpenReview, and a new software tool, aclpub2, has been built for proceedings generation. However, we continue to support both.
It is also common for people to submit older proceedings or journals. We are happy to accept volumes from vetted venues within the fields of speech and natural language processing and computational linguistics. For these situations, it’s best to file a Github issue and/or contact the Anthology director directly (links elsewhere on this page). We can also help resolve questions.
Overview of the Submission Process
Please note the following important dates.
| Deadline | Step |
|---|---|
| Before paper submission deadline | Register your meeting |
| Before paper submission deadline | Request ISBNs |
| 2 weeks before publication | Submit your data |
| 2 weeks before publication | Submit copyright transfer forms |
| After publication | Making corrections |
Register your meeting
If you are a conference publications chair, you must register your intention to submit your proceedings. (Workshop chairs should do this through your main conference publication chair). This step requires you to send (a) the complete list of volumes that will be published in the Anthology (main conference volumes and workshops) and (b) the desired publication date. Your proceedings will be due no later than two weeks prior to this negotiated date.
This information should be submitted to us via a Github issue. Please do this as early as possible, ideally well before the submission deadline. This will allow us to do a quick sanity check of the metadata. As noted above, if you are the chair of a workshop that is colocated with a larger event, please work with your main conference publication chair instead of directly with the Anthology.
Your Github issue should contain the following information for each volume.
- Venue identifier. Each venue (conference or workshop) has a venue identifier. Its basic form is the conference acronym, such as ACL, NAACL, JEP/TALN/RECITAL, and so on. A slugified version of this acronym, containing only numerals and lowercase ASCII letters, is used in the URL for the venue’s page on the Anthology (e.g., ACL → acl, JEP/TALN/RECITAL → jeptalnrecital), and also forms a component of the Anthology ID. For existing venues, be sure to look up the venue’s existing identifier. New venues must have their venue identifier confirmed by the Anthology director (see subsection below). Note: a common mistake is to include the year in the venue identifier, e.g., ACL2020. This confuses a meeting of a venue with the venue itself. The identifier should not have the year or meeting number in it.
- Volume title. This is the title of the volume book that will be published, e.g., Proceedings of the…. We recommend you choose a name consistent with your prior years’ volumes. The full title should not contain abbreviations, except parenthetically. For example, “Proceedings of EMNLP 2019” is not a good title, but “Proceedings of the 2019 Meeting of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)” is a great one. If you have sub-volumes (e.g., long papers, short papers, demonstrations, tutorial abstracts), we suggest you append descriptors after the full volume name. For example, “Proceedings of the 2019 Meeting of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP): Tutorial Abstracts”. But above all, you should also seek consistency with the names of your volumes from prior years.
We emphasize that if you are chairing a meeting attached as a satellite of a main conference (e.g., ACL or EMNLP), please do not communicate directly with the Anthology, but instead first work with your main conference publication chair(s), who will take care of registration and many of the details below.
New venues
If your venue is appearing for the first time in the Anthology, we need to assign it a venue identifier, as described above. You can choose one yourself, but it will require confirmation from the Anthology director. If you are submitting a new venue, please be sure to also include the following information:
- Venue name. Each venue has a name. These names are attached to the venue identifier and stored in our database. If your venue is new, please enter the venue name. Note: similar to the caveat about about the venue identifier, this is the name of the venue, not a particular meeting of the venue. When submitting a new venue to the Anthology, please make sure not to put the year or meeting number in the venue name.
- Website. The website of the venue. Ideally this is a website of the venue itself (e.g., https://naacl.org), and not a particular meeting of the venue.
Submit your data
After your conference management software has collected all the camera-ready papers and associated attachments, you will arrange them into one of two formats.
- ACLPUB. If you’re using Softconf, this will likely be the original ACLPUB format, as described in the ACLPUB → Anthology documentation, because Softconf has built-in support for this.
- aclpub2. More recently, ACL has moved to using aclpub2, which can be run standalone, but is designed to work with ARR and OpenReview.
If you are submitting multiple volumes (e.g., main conference volumes and workshops), please group each volume’s directory inside a single top-level folder for sharing. A link to this directory should be posted to the ingestion request Github issue you created, or alternately shared with the Anthology Director via email. We prefer sharing via HTTP or FTP since these allow automated downloaded, but we can accommodate other methods, such as Dropbox or Google Drive. This sharing should be done two weeks prior to your desired publication date (which was negotiated when you first contacted us) to give us time to process it.
If you are using aclpub2, we suggest you run our format checker on each directory, which will surface errors.
The remaining steps are handled by Anthology staff and use Anthology tools:
- We ingest that data by running additional scripts that convert it into our authoritative format, apply title-case protection, and disambiguate author names.
- This becomes a pull request on our Github repository.
- Once approved and merged into the
masterbranch, the site will be automatically rebuilt (which happens twice a day) and made live.
Please note that workshop chairs should handle this step through their main conference publication chair, and not directly with the Anthology.
Copyright
If you are using the START system, this process is handled as part of the camera-ready submission process.
Otherwise, for copyright transfers, please use the form at:
Forms should be signed by authors and saved using the ACL Anthology identifiers as names.
Please place these into a folder (e.g., copyright-transfers/P11-1001.pdf) and then deliver them in bulk to the Anthology Editor when submitting the proceedings.
In aclpub2, copyrights should be listed as paper attachments with a type of ‘copyright’.
For both current and legacy events, it is good practice for the organizers to attempt to obtain copyright transfers for their materials, but we will ingest materials even if no copyright transfers are on file.
ISBN Numbers
If you plan to publish or print your proceedings, you will need an ISBN. The ACL can provide these for *ACL conferences. Please provide the exact titles of each volume to be assigned an ISBN and send this information to Jennifer Rachford, the ACL Business Manager.
Errata and Corrections
If you get requests from authors needing to post errata or revised versions of the papers, or supplemental attachments after the publication of the proceedings, please refer them to our documentation on the matter. Note that after the publication date, corrections can only be applied to individual papers; the full proceedings volumes will not be replaced or revised.