2024Q1 Reports: ACL 2026

1. The authorship changes policy for ACL conference papers has been formulated and published

In recent years, there have been some issues when organizing ACL conferences, such as, who should deal with authorship issues (beyond scope of PCC as currently scoped)? what is our co-authorship policy that we should consider authorship changes/eligibility relative to? and so on. I have been responsible for establishing a working group to a working group to discuss and formulate the authorship changes policy in response to these issues since July 2023. After several months of careful discussion and revision, the working group finally formed the “Authorship Changes Policy for ACL Conference Papers", which has been voted by the ACL Executive Committee and published on ACL's wiki website (https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/Authorship_Changes_Policy_for_ACL_Conference_Papers), officially becoming a policy provision of ACL. I hope it will play a role for the first time in the organization of the EACL 2024 conference.

In this policy, the responsibilities and obligations of the corresponding authors are defined, and the constraints on author changes are relaxed. Even the corresponding authors can be replaced or added, and two corresponding authors are allowed for each paper, as effective communication between the conference organizers and the paper authors must be ensured during the review, rebuttal and other processes. This will help avoid situations where the conference organizers (PC Chairs or OC Chairs etc.) cannot contact the author of the paper.

2. Responsible for preparing to solicit ACL2026 bidders

The ACL Executive Committee has updated the bidding process, which includes the following key points: 1) Local organizers should not work to engage PCOs, but rather should suggest promising venues based on publicly available information and/or discussions with local government organizations who work to bring major conventions to localities. 2) Local organizers should not propose specific dates, but rather provide information about feasible dates, based on such local data as weather patterns, holidays, etc. 3) When there a multiple viable bids for a given conference/year, ACL will consider those not chosen for future dates, if the local organizers are amenable.

Accordingly, we have to change the bidding ways. I am currently in close contact with Jenn, David, and members of ACL 2026 Coordinating Committee to prepare for the release of the ACL 2026 bidding announcement as soon as possible.

3. Participating in other ACL Executive Committee activities, including discussing and revising Report of the ACL Committee on the Anonymity Policy, and others.