Call for Main Conference Papers

Overview

EMNLP 2025 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research on empirical methods for Natural Language Processing. EMNLP 2025 has a goal of curating 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 be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) and the Computational Linguistics (CL) journals.

Paper Submission Information

Note that we are following a new ARR cycle schedule (5 cycles/year)! Papers may be submitted to the ARR 2025 May cycle. Papers that have received reviews and a meta-review from ARR (whether from the ARR 2025 May cycle or an earlier ARR cycle) may be committed to EMNLP via the commitment link.

Mandatory Reviewing Workload

As our pace of research continues to increase, we need to strengthen the commitment to reviewing for each paper submission. During the ARR submission process, authors will be required to specify which co-authors are committing to cover reviewing in this reviewing cycle. Please see the new ARR policy regarding reviewing workload here. As this is an ARR-wide policy for all *CL conferences, questions or clarifications should be addressed to ARR directly.

Additional Policies

Based on feedback regarding increased reviewing load and (relatedly) decreased review quality, we are planning to implement additional policies to incentivize a lower volume of higher submissions and a higher quality of reviews for the EMNLP’25 ARR cycle. We will be looking into policies similar to those adopted by conferences like SIGKDD’25, CVPR’25 and AAAI’25. We will be announcing these policies on a separate blog post but for now would like to get some input from the community. If you would like to help us shape these policies and have additional suggestions, please use this form.

Submission Topics

EMNLP 2025 aims to have a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

  • Safety and Alignment in LLMs
  • AI/LLM Agents
  • Human-AI Interaction/Cooperation
  • Retrieval-Augmented Language Models
  • Mathematical, Symbolic, and Logical Reasoning in NLP
  • Computational Social Science, Cultural Analytics, and NLP for Social Good
  • Code Models
  • Interpretability, Model Editing, Transparency, and Explainability
  • LLM Efficiency
  • Generalizability and Transfer
  • Dialogue and Interactive Systems
  • Discourse, Pragmatics, and Reasoning
  • Low-resource Methods for NLP
  • Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
  • Natural Language Generation
  • Information Extraction and Retrieval
  • Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
  • Machine Translation
  • Multilinguality and Language Diversity
  • Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
  • Neurosymbolic approaches to NLP
  • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
  • Question Answering
  • Resources and Evaluation
  • Semantics: Lexical, Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas
  • Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
  • Speech Processing and Spoken Language Understanding
  • Summarization
  • Hierarchical Structure Prediction, Syntax, and Parsing
  • NLP Applications
  • Special Theme: Interdisciplinary Recontextualization of NLP

EMNLP 2025 Theme Track: Interdisciplinary Recontextualization of NLP

The core interests of the ACL community are rooted in human-language technologies but also have broad reach into other fields. A couple of recent examples are the burgeoning areas of Code models and Vision models. Earlier cases are exemplified through SIGs connected with the fields of education, medicine, and humanities. Movements such as NLP for Social Good and Computational Social Science show a desire for broad impact, which requires expertise beyond the borders of our own community to achieve. This year’s theme of Advancing our Reach: Interdisciplinary Recontextualization of NLP aims to highlight this need for broader connections with other fields to understand and intensify NLP’s impact. The goal is to increase our awareness of how advances in NLP can impact other fields, and design better strategies to measure that impact both within and across disciplines.

Over the past two decades, the field has advanced at an exponential rate. The term language models is now a household word, industry is booming, and the publication rate is dizzying, but what does that mean about fundamental scientific impact and broader impact on real societal problems? How can we measure that in a rigorous way? Scores on benchmarks are increasing, however, to what extent do our benchmarks reflect the true impact of our technology advances? If we make a distinction between impact within our own field versus impact from our field into other fields, would we see the same magnitude of growth? The conventional measures of success don’t facilitate making critical distinctions, like incremental improvement versus transformative change, or within-field uptake versus broad impact across fields.

So this year we invite engagement with the theme first through theme-specific submission tracks for papers addressing the fundamental technology advances and papers addressing the evaluation methodology issues. However, we also invite Fireside Chat session proposals designed to bring together NLP researchers with leaders from other fields for agenda setting and new collaboration formation. Finally, we invite multi-disciplinary panel proposals that provide opportunities to engage the broader community in reflection related to the theme.

Summary of Theme Track activities

Call for submissions for Panels and Boundary-Spanning chats will go out later. In both cases, the submission will describe the topic area and questions that will be addressed as well as an argument for why this topic is strategic now, especially in connection with the conference theme. The submission should also describe who will participate in the panel or as leadership of the Boundary-spanning Chat (including a short bio describing the specific expertise) and how the session will be organized, including who will act as facilitator of the session. Panels should additionally discuss which questions will be addressed by the panelists. Boundary-spanning chat proposals will describe the proposed outcome of the session (e.g., a workshop proposal for 2026, a special issue of a journal, a new shared task, etc.).

  • Special Theme Best paper award
  • Panel discussion (special submission category)
  • Boundary-Spanning Chat sessions (special submission category)

Two Stage Review: Submission to ARR, Commitment to EMNLP

EMNLP 2025 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., EMNLP 2025), where Senior Area Chairs and Program Chairs make acceptance decisions from the ARR reviews and meta-reviews.

EMNLP 2025 has chosen this approach in coordination with *CL 2025 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.

Important Dates for EMNLP 2025

ARR submission deadline (long & short papers) May 19, 2025
Commitment deadline July 31, 2025
Notification of acceptance (long & short papers) August 20, 2025
Camera-ready papers due (long & short) September 19, 2025
Main Conference (dates for Workshops/Tutorials TBD) November 5-9, 2025

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

Following the ACL and ARR policies, there is no anonymity period requirement.

At the time of submission to ARR, authors will be asked to select a preferred venue (e.g., EMNLP 2025). This is used only to calculate acceptance rates. Authors who selected EMNLP 2025 as a preferred venue when submitting to ARR may choose not to commit to EMNLP 2025 after receiving their reviews, and authors who selected a preferred venue other than EMNLP 2025 when submitting to ARR are still welcome to commit to EMNLP 2025.

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 desk 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:

Program Chairs:

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: emnlp2025-programchairs@googlegroups.com