ACL 2026

ACL, the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, is the oldest and most prestigious conference for natural language processing research. The ACL itself was founded in 1962, making this professional society older than the field of NLP it now defines. The 64th edition takes place in summer 2026 and brings together the global community working on large language models, machine translation, dialogue systems, computational linguistics theory, and the responsible deployment of language technology.

The technical program covers everything from low-level tokenization and morphology to frontier-scale LLM research, alignment, multilingual NLP, and the rapidly growing area of agentic language systems. Acceptance rates hover around 22 to 25 percent, with rolling reviews now handled through the ACL Rolling Review system, which decouples reviewing from venue submission. Expect five days of orals, posters, tutorials, and workshops, plus the celebrated Best Paper, Outstanding Paper, and Test of Time awards.

ACL attracts a more academic and linguistically minded crowd than NeurIPS or ICML, but the rise of LLMs has pulled in significant industry participation from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Cohere, and the major cloud providers. Tutorials, workshops, and student research workshops round out the week, and the conference remains the strongest signal of where rigorous NLP research is heading. For anyone building or studying language models, ACL is the year defining publication venue.