Call for Industry Track Papers
Overview
EMNLP 2025 Industry Track (Suzhou, China)
Main Conference: 5 - 9 November 2025
Paper Submission Deadline: 4 July 2025
Industry Track Papers submission link
Goal
Language technologies and their applications are an integral and critical part of our daily lives. The development of many of these technologies trace their roots to academic and industrial research laboratories where researchers invented a plethora of algorithms, benchmarked them against shared datasets and perfected the performance of these algorithms to provide plausible solutions to real-world applications.
The EMNLP 2025 Industry Track aims to highlight this mutual influence of language technology in academia and industry, which has significantly contributed to the proliferation of industrial applications. The track provides the opportunity for researchers, engineers, practitioners and users to meet and discuss the latest language technologies methods as deployed in a real-world setting and aims to be the premier forum for knowledge sharing across the boundary between academia and industry.
We acknowledge the unique difficulties encountered when adapting language technologies for building novel and robust real-world applications as the journey from theoretical research to practical deployment is fraught with new challenges. These range from the technical aspects of system deployment and optimizing for efficiency, to making informed design choices or methodological considerations of incorporating human feedback and oversight.
To provide a forum to address these multifaceted issues, we are seeking submissions that not only delve into research but also demonstrate the application of systems in real-world scenarios, irrespective of whether they involve proprietary data.
Contributions are invited across all spectrums of language technologies and systems, with a special emphasis on innovations and implementations that hold relevance to real-world applications. We encourage submissions from both non-profit and for-profit sectors, with the understanding that the end-users of these systems extend beyond the NLP community. Please note that if submissions involve proprietary data, there is no requirement to make this data available.
Topics of Interest
The EMNLP 2025 Industry Track provides the opportunity to highlight the key insights and new research challenges that arise from the development and deployment of real-world applications using language technologies.
Relevant areas include 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
- Human-in-the-Loop approaches to application development
- Implementation at speed, scale or low-cost
- System combination
Novel applications and use cases, with topics in alphabetical order including, but not limited to:
- Best practices, lessons learned or a vision on deploying real-world applications
- 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 NLP applications
Methods for deployed systems, with topics in alphabetical order including, but not limited to:
- Ethics, bias, fairness and harmlessness
- Interpretability
- Interactive systems
- Offline and online system evaluation methodologies
- Online learning
- Robustness
Important Dates
- Paper submission deadline: July 4, 2025
- Reviewer-author discussion period: August 8 – September 4, 2025
- Notification: September 24, 2025
- Camera-ready version of papers due: October 8, 2025
- Main conference: 5 - 9 November 2025
Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).
Following the ACL and ARR Policies for Review and Citation, updated in early 2025, there is no anonymity period requirement, e.g. one may upload the paper to arXiv at any time.
Evaluation Criteria
Submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind manner and assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, and clarity. Submissions to the EMNLP 2025 Industry Track should emphasize real-world implementations of natural language processing 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 repeatable (though the data may be proprietary).
Paper Submission
Authors are invited to submit original papers that are not previously published, accepted to be published, or under consideration for publication in any other forum.
Submission
The papers should be submitted through the EMNLP 2025 industry track online submission system.
Formatting
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically, in PDF format and formatted using the templates available here. 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 rejected without review.
Length
Industry Track papers cannot exceed 6 pages in length; however, references do not count toward the page limit, nor do the following optional sections: acknowledgments (only in the final version), ethical considerations, and appendices.
Appendices
Appendices need to appear in the main paper’s PDF, after the bibliography. Paper submissions must remain fully self-contained, as appendices are completely optional and reviewers are not even asked to review or download them.
Supplementary Materials
Authors may submit separate files as supplementary materials such as software or data.
Anonymization for Double-blind Review
Submissions, appendices, and supplementary materials must not include authors’ names or affiliations. Self-references that reveal identities must be avoided. Avoid links to non-anonymized repositories. Use anonymized GitHub or Anonym Share instead.
Citation and Comparison
Cite all refereed publications relevant to the submission. Recent, unpublished work may be excluded. Preprints superseded by refereed publications should cite the latter. See ACL Policies for Review and Citation.
Writing Assistance
The EMNLP 2025 Industry Track adheres to the ACL policy on using writing assistants, detailed here.
Camera Ready Version
Accepted papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 7 pages) to address reviewer feedback. Final versions should remove anonymization and may include author institutions, trade names, and identifiable product screenshots. Optional video/slides/posters can also be submitted to the ACL Anthology.
Presentation Requirement
All accepted papers must be presented at the conference (onsite or online). The EMNLP 2025 Industry Track will run in parallel with the Main Conference Track.
Presentation Mode
Papers will be presented as oral talks or posters, with no distinction in the proceedings. Presentation mode is based on the nature of the work, not its quality.
Authorship
Author lists must reflect all and only those who contributed significantly to the work. No changes to authorship after submission deadline.
Multiple Submissions Policy
EMNLP 2025 Industry Track will not consider submissions that are under review elsewhere or submitted to multiple tracks. Duplicate submissions or significant overlap (>25%) with other submissions will be rejected. Related papers must be cited with the following format:
Anonymous Authors, “Title of the paper”, Under submission at EMNLP 2025 (TRACK NAME).
Ethics Policy
Authors are required to follow the ACL Code of Ethics. Ethical impact, use of data, and application of work must be carefully considered. Optional ethics discussion (beyond the 6-page limit) is encouraged, especially for sensitive topics. Papers raising ethical concerns may undergo additional ethics committee review. See ethics FAQ for guidance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the EMNLP 2025 Industry Track only for participants from industry?
No. The track welcomes all researchers with relevant work.
Can academics and students also submit papers to industry track?
Yes, if their work aligns with the Industry Track call.
I work in industry. Can I still submit my paper to the main conference track?
Yes. Choose the track that best fits the focus of your paper.
What do you mean by real-world applications?
Systems deployed or expected to be deployed for real-world use (outside labs, classrooms, etc.).
Will the papers in the industry track be published in the proceedings?
Yes, in a dedicated volume. See EMNLP 2024 Industry Track proceedings.
How do I decide whether to submit to the main conference or the industry track?
Review the calls for both tracks. If in doubt, contact the track chairs.
Industry Track Chairs
- Saloni Potdar (Apple Inc.)
- Lina Rojas-Barahona (Orange)