ACL 2027 Call for Papers

ACL 2027 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. ACL 2027 has a goal of 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 feature papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) and the Computational Linguistics (CL) journals. We also introduce the Special Theme Homogenization and knowledge collapse in LLMs, which we hope will stimulate exciting research contributions.

Papers submitted to ACL 2027, but not selected for the main conference, will also automatically be considered for publication in the Findings of the Association of Computational Linguistics.

Important Dates

Event Date
ARR submission deadline (long & short papers) Jan 4, 2027
Notification of acceptance (long & short papers) TBD
Main Conference August 20-22, 2027
Workshops August 18-19, 2027
Tutorials August 17, 2027

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

Paper Submission Information

Dual submissions are not allowed! Please check the ARR Call for Papers for details. Papers must be submitted, at latest, by the ARR 2027 January cycle. Papers that have received reviews and a meta-review from ARR (whether from the ARR 2027 January cycle or an earlier ARR cycle) may be committed to ACL via the commitment link (not available yet).  ACL has adopted a sustainable reviewing policy starting from October 2026. Read the full announcement.

Submission Topics

ACL 2027 aims to have a broad technical program of papers that make a contribution to computational processing of natural language. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas (see also the ARR submission scope):

  • Special Theme: Homogenization and knowledge collapse in LLMs
  • Clinical and Biomedical Applications
  • Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
  • Dialogue and Interactive Systems
  • Discourse and Pragmatics
  • Efficient Methods for NLP
  • Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
  • Human-Centered NLP and Human-AI Interaction
  • Information Extraction
  • Information Retrieval and Text Mining
  • Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
  • Language Diversity and NLP for Low-resourced Languages
  • Language Modeling
  • LLM Agents for NLP
  • 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 and Code Models
  • NLP and Symbolic Reasoning
  • NLP Applications
  • Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation
  • Question Answering
  • 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

ACL 2027 Theme Track: Homogenization and knowledge collapse in LLMs

Recent research suggests that, despite their impressive capabilities and broad applicability, LLMs tend to collapse diversity in their outputs. As LLMs become fundamental tools for information retrieval and creative expression, this raises concerns about a shift from rich, human-driven discourse toward what has been called a “generative monoculture” where current training and alignment practices may inadvertently compress the wide spectrum of human thought into a limited range of stereotyped outputs. This special theme invites papers investigating whether LLMs produce low-diversity responses, rely on repetitive linguistic structures, and converge on a narrow set of solutions, potentially acting as drivers of cultural homogenization.

The theme track invites empirical and theoretical work as well as surveys and position papers reflecting on Homogenization and knowledge collapse in LLMs from different perspectives. Possible topics of research include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Metrics and methodologies for assessing homogenization, cultural flattening and knowledge collapse trends in LLMs.
  • Identification of the mechanisms that could be inducing these trends, e.g. analyses of training data, alignment strategies, decoding methods, and optimization objectives that may contribute to reduced output diversity, along with proposals for mitigation.
  • Search space exploration vs. convergence in generative models: To what extent do LLMs explore the breadth of possible responses versus converging on high-probability, stereotyped outputs? What are the trade-offs between coherence, safety, and diversity?
  • Human vs. Model Diversity: interdisciplinary perspectives on epistemic diversity and Knowledge Representation in LLMs, including comparative studies of variability in human- vs. LLM-generated responses across domains (e.g., linguistic, cultural, cognitive), drawing on insights from linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, and related fields.
  • Cross-linguistic homogenization: When queried in different languages, do LLMs respond more uniformly than humans would? To what extent are LLMs capable of adapting their responses to the writing and cultural norms that best associate to the query language? Do LLMs produce more uniform text in lower-resource languages?
  • LLMs and ideological polarization: Under what conditions might LLMs contribute to homogenized or fragmented discourse? This includes investigation on whether and how LLMs compress, filter, or privilege certain forms of knowledge, and the implications for pluralism in knowledge systems.

Theme track submissions can be either long or short. We anticipate having a special session for this theme at the conference and a Thematic Paper Award in addition to other categories of awards.

Two Stage Review: Submission to ARR, Commitment to ACL

ACL 2027 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., ACL 2027), 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).

ACL 2027 has chosen this approach in coordination with *CL 2027 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:

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:

  • Yusuke Miyao, The University of Tokyo

Program Chairs:

  • David Adelani, McGill University
  • Arianna Bisazza, University of Groningen
  • Jan Buys, University of Cape Town
  • Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques, National Autonomous University of Mexico
  • David Schlangen, University of Potsdam

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:

acl27-pcs@googlegroups.com