ACL Related Work

Use this to audit positioning and citation hygiene. NLP moves fast enough that related-work sections age between ARR cycles; the section must prove the authors know the field as of this cycle, not as of the project's start.

The Anthology-first rule

• When a paper exists in the ACL Anthology (or another archival venue), cite that version, not its arXiv preprint, Anthology entries are the community's citation of record and carry stable BibTeX.
• The Anthology is fully open access (post-2016 materials under CC BY 4.0), so "couldn't access the published version" is never a defense here.
• For findings-tier work, cite it as Findings of ACL/EMNLP, it is archival and reviewers treat miscrediting it as sloppiness.

Freshness pressure unique to this field

• Expect at least one reviewer to name a baseline or dataset from the last two conference rounds. Sweep ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, TACL, and CL for the nearest neighbors published since your project began.
• LLM-era concurrency is the norm: assume 2-4 similar preprints exist. Cite the ones findable at submission, contrast on technique rather than date, and avoid priority wars that reviewers cannot adjudicate.
• If a newer model release makes your comparison set look dated mid-cycle, address it in the author response and plan the upgrade for camera-ready or resubmission, silence reads as unawareness.

Positioning moves that work at ACL

Contribution type	The contrast reviewers want spelled out
Method	Nearest prior method + the mechanism-level difference, not just scores
Resource	Existing datasets' coverage gaps: languages, domains, phenomena, license
Analysis / evaluation	What prior evaluations measured incorrectly or could not see
Metric	Failure cases of the incumbent metric, with correlation evidence
Theme-track paper	How the work answers the year's theme question (ACL 2026: explainability)