IJCNLP 2026 deadline

Key dates

1. ARR initial submission: Full paper

   Mon, May 25, 2026 · 23:59 AoE

2. Reviewed-paper commitment, round 1: Full paper

   Fri, Aug 7, 2026 · 23:59 AoE

3. Reviewed-paper commitment, round 2: Full paper

   Tue, Aug 25, 2026 · 23:59 AoE

4. Conference

   Nov 6-10, 2026 · Hengqin, Zhuhai, China (Hybrid)

What IJCNLP reviewers will look for

AACL 2026 does not run its own reviewing: papers are reviewed in ACL Rolling Review and then committed to AACL, whose program chairs decide from the ARR reviews and meta-review. AACL-IJCNLP 2026 (Hengqin, China, November 2026) takes papers from the ARR May 2026 cycle (shared with EMNLP) or earlier; commitment ran in August 2026. ARR reviews are about half a page. The form separates objective Soundness (must be justified in the text) from subjective Excitement, and the Overall Assessment is an outcome recommendation (Award / Conference / Findings / Resubmit), all on 1–5 with half points. Weaknesses are a numbered list specific enough for an AC to follow; suggested extra work goes under Comments. The guidelines list lazy-reviewing heuristics to avoid, e.g. "not novel" without a reference, "not SOTA", "simple method", "only tested on English", "I would have done X", or listing limitations the authors already acknowledge.

Overall score

Overall Assessment, 1–5 (top: “Consider for Award”)

Sub-scores

Soundness, Excitement, Reproducibility, Datasets, Software (1–5)

Written fields

Paper Summary · Summary Of Strengths · Summary Of Weaknesses · Comments Suggestions And Typos · Best Paper Justification · Limitations And Societal Impact · Ethical Concerns · Needs Ethics Review

Author checklist

Responsible NLP Research Checklist, 18 items

Where the bar sits. AACL-IJCNLP published a Findings volume in 2022 and 2023. In the Overall Assessment, 4 ("Conference") argues for the main conference and 3 ("Findings") for the Findings of the ACL volume, which the program chairs may offer to committed papers that are sound but less exciting. ARR publishes no cutoff; venue senior ACs decide. Rule of thumb: average Overall Assessment ≥ 3.5 → main conference plausible, 3.0–3.5 → Findings, < 3.0 → likely rejected. Main conference acceptance is about 20–25%, plus ~13–15% Findings.