Call for Papers

Student Research Workshop co-located with ACL 2026 in San Diego, US.

Important Dates

• Pre-Submission Mentorship Deadline: February 4, 2026
• Pre-Submission Mentorship Feedback: February 25, 2026
• Direct Submission Deadline: March 18, 2026
• ARR Commitment Deadline: April 15, 2026
• Acceptance Notification: April 24, 2026
• Camera ready: May 8, 2026
• Grant Application Submission: May 8, 2026
• Grant Application Notification: May 20, 2026
• ACL 2026 Conference Dates: July 5-7, 2026

All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”)

Submission link for the pre-submission mentorship program is now available here

About the Student Research Workshop

The ACL 2026 Student Research Workshop (SRW) is a forum to bring together students investigating various areas of Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The workshop provides an excellent opportunity for participants to present their work and to receive mentorship and valuable feedback from the international research community.

The workshop’s goal is to aid students at multiple stages of their education, including highschool, undergraduate, MSc/MA, junior and senior PhD students, in getting familiar with conducting and presenting their research.

General Rules for Submission

We invite papers in two different categories:

• Thesis Proposals: This category is appropriate for PhD students who have decided on a thesis topic and wish to get feedback on their proposal and broader ideas for their continuing work.
• Research Papers: Papers in this category can describe completed work, or work in progress with preliminary results. For these papers, the first author MUST BE a current student (high school, graduate, or undergraduate). Topics of interest for the SRW are the same as for the main ACL 2026 conference.

Submissions (in both categories) may be archival or non-archival, based on the wish of the authors. All archival papers will be published in the ACL 2026 SRW Proceedings. Non-archival papers may be submitted to any venue in the future except for another SRW. Please note that submissions marked as non-archival cannot be changed to archival after acceptance.

Why Submit to ACL SRW?

There are many good reasons to submit to the ACL SRW, such as:

• Mentorship program: ACL SRW provides a unique opportunity for students to receive constructive feedback and to improve their work through a pre-submission mentorship program.
• Improving your publication record: publishing a paper as an undergraduate or as a MSc/MA student is beneficial when applying for a PhD program. Publishing a paper in an ACL SRW workshop can be really helpful for improving students’ publication record.
• Explorative Studies: We encourage the submission of studies with positive and negative results providing insights on why and in which scenarios a particular method succeeds and fails.

All accepted papers and thesis proposals will be presented either as oral presentations or during poster sessions, which will give students an opportunity to interact with and to present their work to a large and diverse audience, including top researchers in the field and assigned mentors.

Submission Requirements

We accept both archival submissions (which will be included in the conference proceedings) and non-archival submissions (which will be presented at the workshop but will not be included in the proceedings).

All submissions (archival and non-archival) must follow the anonymity period and the restrictions of the main conference.

Long papers consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus an unlimited number of pages for references and supplementary material like the appendix. Upon acceptance, papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages).

Short papers consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus an unlimited number of pages for references and supplementary material like the appendix. Upon acceptance, papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 5 pages).

Authors are encouraged to use the additional page to address reviewers’ comments. Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available as an Overleaf template and also a downloadable directly (Latex and Word). We strongly encourage participants to use the Latex template. All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in these template files. The review process will be double-blind, and thus all submissions must be anonymized. The SRW invites papers on topics related to computational linguistics, including but not limited to the following:

• Computational Social Science and Social Media
• Dialogue and Interactive Systems
• Discourse and Pragmatics
• Ethics and NLP
• Information Extraction
• Information Retrieval and Text Mining
• Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
• Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics, and Beyond
• Large Language Models
• Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics
• Machine Learning for NLP
• Machine Translation and Multilinguality
• NLP Applications
• Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation
• Question Answering
• Resources and Evaluation
• Semantics: Lexical
• Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual - Inference, and Other Areas
• Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
• Speech and Multimodality
• Summarization
• Syntax: Tagging, Chunking, and Parsing
• Thesis Proposals

Pre-Submission Mentorship Program

The SRW offers students the opportunity to receive feedback prior to submitting their work for review. The goal of the pre-submission mentorship program is to improve the quality of writing and presentation of the student’s work, not to critique the work itself. Participation is optional but encouraged. The pre-submission mentorship is not anonymous.

Students wishing to participate in the pre-submission mentorship must submit their paper draft through OpenReview by February 4th, 2026.

Note that even though the mentoring is not done anonymously, the paper needs to be anonymized. We will check for the formality of the paper including formatting before we match it with mentors.

The participants will be assigned a mentor who will review and will provide feedback within four weeks. This mentor will not be the same person who will review the final submission. The feedback will be in the form of guidelines and suggestions to improve the overall writing, which should ideally be incorporated before the actual submission deadline.

You CAN submit a paper at the SRW submission deadline even if you did not participate in the pre-submission mentoring. If you did submit a draft for pre-submission mentoring, you will need to make a new submission for the final version of the paper. The submission website will have separate tracks for pre-submission mentorship and the final paper submission.

How to submit

There are two routes for paper submission:

• Direct submission: Papers should be submitted through openreview using the following link: Direct Submission. Each paper will receive a minimum of three reviews. The review process will be double-blind. Reviewers will not see authors, authors will not see reviewers. Reviews and submissions will not be made publicly visible.
• ACL Rolling Review (ARR) Papers: Papers which have already been reviewed through the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) system can be committed to ACL 2026. These papers will not be re-reviewed. Program Chairs will make acceptance decisions based on the ARR reviews and meta-reviews. ARR papers should be committed through openreview using the following link: ARR Submission. When making a new submission, you will be able to specify the details of the ARR paper that you want to commit, including the openreview ID of your paper.