Acl Topic Selection
Use when deciding whether a project fits ACL versus EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, TACL...
Install
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill acl-topic-selection -g -a claude-code -y- Repository
- brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills1.3k
- Category
- Data and ML
- Updated
- 1mo ago
- License
- MIT
- Context cost
- Mediumabout 1,536 tokens
- Runs scripts
- No, instructions only
What it does
Use when deciding whether a project fits ACL versus EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, TACL, Computational Linguistics, COLM, or an ML venue, covering contribution typing for NLP work, long-versus-short paper choice, the annual theme track, Findings-tier expectations, and sharpening the computational-linguistics framing before writing starts.
ACL Topic Selection
Use this before the first draft. ACL is the flagship of the *ACL family: broadest scope across computational linguistics and NLP, the most competitive main-program bar, and, under ACL Rolling Review, a venue choice you finalize at commitment time, which gives topic strategy an unusual second chance.
What ACL rewards
- A contribution about language: modeling it, measuring it, resourcing it, or explaining how systems process it, with the linguistic question visible, not incidental.
- Typed contributions reviewers can classify fast: method, resource, evaluation/metric, analysis, theory, or position. Papers that are half method and half unvalidated resource read as neither.
- Evidence proportional to breadth (see
acl-experiments) and an error analysis that says something about language, not just scores. - Work engaging the current field conversation, for ACL 2026, the special theme was explainability of NLP models, with a dedicated Thematic Paper Award; each edition names its own theme.
Family routing
| Signal | Better home |
|---|---|
| Core NLP contribution, broad audience, strongest possible reviews wanted | ACL (or whichever *ACL your ARR package is eligible to commit to) |
| Empirical, engineering-forward NLP; dense experimental papers | EMNLP, historically the empirical sibling, same ARR pipeline |
| Regional relevance, or timing fits its cycle windows | NAACL / EACL / AACL |
| Needs >9 pages, revision-based journal reviewing, no conference clock | TACL (journal, also Anthology-published) |
| Survey-scale or theoretical linguistics depth | Computational Linguistics (journal) |
| LLM-centric work thin on language questions | COLM or an ML venue (NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR) |
| Deployed-system lessons, product constraints | ACL industry track, separate CFP and deadlines |
| Early-stage, student-led | ACL Student Research Workshop |
