Call for Papers: ACL 2026 Industry Track
ACL 2026 Industry Track in San Diego, CA, United States
Conference: July 2 - 7, 2026
Paper submission deadline: February 14, 2026
BACKGROUNDPERMALINK
Language technologies are an integral and critical part of our daily lives. Many of these applications have their roots in academic and industrial research laboratories where researchers invented a plethora of algorithms, benchmarked them against shared datasets and perfected their performance to provide plausible solutions to real-world applications. While a controlled laboratory setting is vital for a deeper scientific understanding of the problems underlying language technologies and the impact of algorithmic design choices on their performance, transitioning the technology to real-world industrial strength applications raises a different, yet challenging, set of technical issues.
We acknowledge the challenges when adapting language technologies for building novel and robust real-world applications as the journey from theoretical research to practical deployment can be difficult. Challenges can include technical aspects of system deployment and optimizing for efficiency, making informed design choices or methodological considerations of incorporating human feedback, evaluation and oversight. To provide a forum to address these multifaceted issues, we are seeking submissions that not only dive into research but also demonstrate the application of systems in real-world scenarios, irrespective of whether they involve proprietary data.
TOPICSPERMALINK
We invite submissions describing innovations and implementations in all areas of speech and natural language processing (NLP) technologies and systems that are relevant to real-word applications. The primary focus of this track is on papers that advance the understanding of, and demonstrate the effective handling of, practical issues related to the deployment of language processing or language generation technologies, including those of large language models, in non-trivial real-world systems, meaning: applications deployed for real-world use, i.e., outside controlled environments such as laboratories, classrooms or experimental crowd-sourced setups, also including applications that use NLP and/or speech technology, even if not state of the art in terms of research. There is no requirement that the system be made by a for-profit company, but the users of the system are most likely outside the NLP research community.
This track provides an opportunity to highlight the key insights and new research challenges that arise from real world implementations.
Relevant areas include:
A. System design, efficiency, maintainability and scalability of real-world applications, with topics in alphabetical order including, but not limited to:
* Benchmarks and methods for improving the latency and efficiency of systems * Continuous maintenance and improvement of deployed systems * Efficient methods for training and inference * Enabling infrastructure for large-scale deployment * Handling unexpected user behaviour * Human-in-the-Loop approaches to application development * Implementation at speed, scale and low-cost * Negative results related to real-world applications * System combination
B. Novel applications and use cases, with topics in alphabetical order including, but not limited to:
* Best practices and lessons learned * Case studies, from design to deployment * Description of an application or system * Design of application-relevant datasets * Development of methods under system constraints (model or data size) * Novel, previously unsolved NLP problems and novel NLP applications
C. Methods for deployed systems, with topics in alphabetical order including, but not limited to:
* Ethics, bias, fairness, harmlessness and trustworthiness in deployed systems * Interpretability * Interactive systems * Offline and online system evaluation methodologies * Online learning * Robustness
In addition, opinion/vision papers related to real-world applications are also welcome.
Submissions must clearly identify one of the following three areas they fall into:
*
_Deployed_: Must describe a system that solves a non-trivial real-world problem. The focus may include describing the problem related to actual use cases, its significance (against opportunity size, value proposition, and ideal end state), design/formulation of methods, tradeoff design decision for solutions, deployment challenges, and lessons learned. *
_Emerging_: Must describe the development of a system that solves a non-trivial real-world problem (it need not be deployed or even close, but there needs to be evidence that this development is intended for real-world deployment). Papers that describe enabling infrastructure for large-scale deployment of NLP techniques also fall in this category. *
_Discovery_: Must include results obtained from NLP applications in real-world scenarios that result in actionable insights. These discoveries should reveal promising directions in their application areas, leading to further system or societal enhancements. For example, an actionable discovery from an analysis of call center transcripts may reveal that certain language choices negatively impact customer experience, leading to better training of service representatives and improved customer experience.
IMPORTANT DATESPERMALINK
Paper submission deadline February 14, 2026
Author response deadline March 29, 2026
Notification of acceptance April 12, 2026
Camera-ready deadline April 19, 2026
Main conference July 2-7, 2026
All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (anywhere on earth).
Following the ACL and ARR Policies for Review and Citation, updated in early 2024, there is no anonymity period requirement, e.g., one may upload the paper to arXiv at any time.
Please note that the ACL 2026 Industry Track does not use ARR!
EVALUATION AND DECISION CRITERIAPERMALINK
Submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind manner and assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, and clarity. Submissions to the industry track should emphasize real-world implementations of NLP systems, the development of such systems, or provide insights based on real-world datasets with obvious industry impact. For papers that rely heavily on empirical evaluations, the experimental methods and results should be clear, well executed, and reproducible (though the data may be proprietary); in that regard, due to the type of work we expect to be submitted to the Industry Track, we ask authors to pay specific attention to their evaluation methodologies (human vs. automated).
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTSPERMALINK
Authors are invited to submit original, full-length (6 pages) industry track papers that are not previously published, accepted to be published, or under consideration for publication in any other forum. Manuscripts should be submitted digitally, in PDF format and formatted using the ACL 2026 formatting requirements. Please do not modify these style files, nor should you use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be desk-rejected.
Length and appendices: Industry Track papers cannot exceed 6 pages in length (excluding ethical considerations and references). After the bibliography, papers can have an optional appendix with, e.g., examples or sample inputs/outputs, pre-processing decisions, model parameters, feature templates, pseudocode, information about user studies, additional errors analysis or other details that are necessary for the replication of the work described in the paper. Note, however, that paper submissions must be fully self-contained, i.e., supplementary materials, as provided in the appendix, are completely optional, and reviewers are not even asked to review them. Note that it will not be possible to submit additional separate files as supplementary materials. Authors are asked not to abuse the option of an unlimited appendix and only to include material that supports the primary messages and content of the paper; to avoid any misunderstandings regarding the nature of the appendix, for the final papers, especially those with an appendix of excessive length, the ACL 2026 Industry Track chairs reserve the right to include a statement that it was not mandatory for reviewers to review the material presented in the appendix.
Double-blind review: Industry Track submissions must neither include the authors' names nor their affiliations. Self-references that reveal the authors' identities must be avoided. For example, instead of "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …" or even "We previously showed (Anonymous, 1991) …", please use "Smith (1991) previously showed …". Authors should also be careful not to reveal their affiliation indirectly, for example through screenshots or trade names. Submissions should avoid links to non-anonymized repositories: code should be submitted as a link to an anonymized repository (e.g., Anonymous GitHub or Anonym Share). Please avoid links to storage services like Dropbox (which may track the reviewers downloading the resources). Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be desk-rejected.
Citation and comparison: Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their submission but may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited). In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version. Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to a submission, and authors are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis. For more information, see the ACL Policies for Review and Citation.
Writing assistance: The ACL 2026 Industry Track adheres to the ACL policy on using writing assistants (including AI-based writing assistants and other AI tools) available here.
Submission system: Papers have to be submitted through the ACL 2026 Industry Track online submission system. The submission link will be provided soon.
Final version: Accepted papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 7 pages; ethical considerations, acknowledgements and references do not count against this limit) so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account. Previous presentations of the work (e.g., preprints on arXiv.org) should be indicated in a footnote that should be excluded from the review submission, but included in the final version of papers appearing in the ACL 2026 proceedings.
The final version should remove anonymization in text, citation, and figures. For example, the final version may include the name of the authors' institutions, trademarks, and screenshots of identifiable products. Please notice that once the paper has been submitted, no changes to the list of authors are allowed.
Presentation requirement for accepted papers: Industry Track papers will be presented orally or as posters, to be determined by the program committee. All accepted papers must be presented at the conference (either via online or onsite presence). At least one author of each accepted paper must register for ACL 2026 by the early registration deadline. The ACL 2026 Industry Track will run in parallel with the Research Track.
Presentation Mode: Accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between papers presented orally or as posters
Authorship: The author list for submissions should include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the work presented. Each author listed on a submission to the ACL 2026 Industry Track will be notified of submissions and the final decision. No changes to the order or composition of authorship may be made to submissions to the ACL 2026 Industry Track after the paper submission deadline
MULTIPLE SUBMISSION POLICYPERMALINK
ACL 2026 will not consider any paper that is under review in a journal or another conference at the time of submission, and submitted papers must not be submitted elsewhere during the ACL 2026 review period. This policy covers all refereed and archival conferences and workshops (e.g., NeurIPS, ACL workshops), as well as ARR. In addition, we will not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or results with papers that have been (or will be) published elsewhere. Authors submitting more than one paper to ACL 2026 must ensure that their submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.
Submissions of identical or closely related work to multiple ACL 2026 tracks (e.g., to the research track and industry track) will be treated as duplicate submissions. Such submissions violate our multiple submission policy and will be rejected without review. The authors should also include the papers that their paper overlaps with or extends in the references section as follows: _Anonymous Authors_, "_Title of the paper_", _Under submission at ACL 2026 (TRACK NAME)_.
ETHICS POLICYPERMALINK
Authors are required to honor the ethical code set out in the ACL Code of Ethics. The consideration of the ethical impact of our research, use of data, and potential applications of our work has always been an important consideration, and as artificial intelligence is becoming more mainstream, these issues are increasingly pertinent. We ask that all authors read the code, and ensure that their work is conformant to this code. Where a paper may raise ethical issues, we ask that you include in the paper an explicit discussion of these issues, which will be taken into account in the review process. We reserve the right to reject papers on ethical grounds, where the authors are judged to have operated counter to the code of ethics, or have inadequately addressed legitimate ethical concerns with their work.
Authors will be allowed extra space after the sixth page for an optional broader impact statement or other discussion of ethics. The ACL review form will include a section addressing these issues and papers flagged for ethical concerns by reviewers or ACs will be further reviewed by an ethics committee. Note that an ethical considerations section is not required, but papers working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks that do not discuss these issues will not be accepted. Conversely, the mere inclusion of an ethical considerations section does not guarantee acceptance. In addition to acceptance or rejection, papers may receive a conditional acceptance recommendation. Camera-ready versions of papers designated as conditional accept will be re-reviewed by the ethics committee to determine whether the concerns have been adequately addressed. Please read the ethics FAQ for more guidance on some problems to look out for and key concerns to consider relative to the code of ethics.
CONTACT INFORMATIONPERMALINK
Industry Track Co-Chairs:
* Yunyao Li (Adobe) * Georg Rehm (DFKI GmbH) * Mei Tu (Samsung)
Email: acl-2026-industry-track@googlegroups.com
General Chair: Philipp Koehn (Johns Hopkins University)