NLP Conference Submission Guide: Top Venues Beyond ACL and EMNLP

Why NLP Researchers Need a Submission Timeline Map

In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), conference papers are often valued more highly than journal publications — they have shorter publication cycles, faster dissemination, and reflect cutting-edge developments in real time. This phenomenon is especially prominent in computer science: a journal paper typically takes 6–18 months from submission to publication, while top conferences usually complete their review process in just 3–4 months. In an era where large language models can undergo multiple generational updates within a single year, this time gap can mean the difference between a "leading" result and an "outdated" one. Moreover, top conferences like ACL and NeurIPS employ rigorous peer review with low acceptance rates (typically 15%–25%), and their papers often rival top journals in quality and citation impact.

Recently, a researcher asked on Reddit: "Besides EMNLP, what other A*/A-level NLP conferences are worth paying attention to?" The question seems simple, but it touches on a core issue that every NLP researcher, PhD student, and even industry engineer needs to address.

By understanding the submission deadlines and positioning of major NLP conferences, you can submit your work to the most suitable venue at the right time. This article systematically reviews the ratings, submission cycles, and selection strategies for mainstream NLP and related AI conferences.

The Full Landscape of Top NLP Conferences

The Three Core NLP Conferences (ACL Family)

The three universally recognized top NLP conferences are all organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and hold A* ratings in the CORE ranking system. The CORE (Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia) ranking is a widely adopted conference quality assessment framework in computer science, maintained by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. It classifies conferences into four tiers: A* (flagship), A (excellent), B (good), and C (other recognized conferences). In addition to CORE, the academic community also references the CCF (China Computer Federation) recommended list, CSRankings, and other ranking systems. Different systems may position the same conference differently, so researchers typically need to make comprehensive judgments.

The three core conferences are:

ACL (Annual Meeting of the ACL): The absolute benchmark of the NLP field, held annually in mid-year, with submission deadlines typically in the preceding winter or early in the year. Whether for theoretical innovation or system applications, ACL is the most influential and preferred venue.
EMNLP (Empirical Methods in NLP): Emphasizes empirical methods and experimental validation, held annually in fall (November–December). EMNLP's submission window is usually around mid-year (May–June), complementing ACL's timeline.
NAACL (North American Chapter of ACL): The annual meeting of the North American chapter, typically held in spring (March–June), with submission deadlines mostly at the end of the preceding year.

These three conferences, together with the regional EACL (European chapter) and AACL (Asia-Pacific chapter), form the complete ACL family.

Of particular note is the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) mechanism — a unified rolling review system shared across multiple conferences. ARR was officially launched by ACL in 2021 as a revolutionary review reform, partially inspired by the rolling submission model of journals. Under the traditional model, each conference organized its own independent review process, and authors had to submit papers before specific deadlines — missing one meant waiting for the next conference cycle. ARR decouples the review process from individual conferences: authors can submit papers to the ARR platform by the 15th of each month, and a unified review committee assigns reviewers. After the review is completed (typically 6–8 weeks), authors can choose to "commit" the review results directly to an upcoming ACL-family conference, revise the paper based on reviewer feedback and resubmit for a new round of review, or withdraw and submit elsewhere. This mechanism largely breaks the traditional "deadline sprint" pattern, allowing more flexible pacing for paper refinement, though it also introduces new challenges around review consistency and reviewer workload.

Top AI Conferences Highly Relevant to NLP

Many important NLP research contributions — especially those involving LLM architectural innovations, multimodal learning, and similar directions — are also submitted to comprehensive AI/ML conferences. These conferences also hold A* ratings and enjoy high recognition within the NLP community:

NeurIPS: The flagship machine learning conference, with deadlines typically in May and the conference held in December. A large volume of foundational LLM-related work is published here, including Transformer architecture improvements, training methodology innovations, and Scaling Laws research.
ICML: Deadlines around January–February, held in July. Emphasizes methodological and theoretical contributions, with higher expectations for mathematical derivations and theoretical analysis.
ICLR: Known for its open review process on OpenReview, with deadlines around September–October and the conference held the following spring. ICLR's OpenReview platform makes all submitted papers, reviewer comments, author responses, and final decisions publicly visible. Reviewer quality is subject to public scrutiny, and the research community can participate in open discussions during the review period. Authors can browse historical review records to understand reviewer attitudes and preferences toward specific research directions. In recent years, ICLR has accepted a large number of high-quality NLP papers, particularly in Representation Learning and pre-trained model research.
AAAI / IJCAI: Comprehensive AI conferences, with AAAI deadlines typically around August. They cover a broad range of topics and are well-suited for interdisciplinary research.

For researchers focused on methodological innovation or model architecture design, these comprehensive top conferences are often more suitable venues than pure NLP conferences.

How to Plan Your Year-Round Submission Timeline

Building an Annual Submission Map

Arranging the above conferences by submission deadline reveals a nearly year-round submission chain:

Time Period	Major Conference Deadlines
January–February	ICML
May–June	EMNLP, NeurIPS
August	AAAI
September–October	ICLR
Winter	ACL, NAACL

This means that no matter which month you complete your research, you can almost always find a high-quality conference with an upcoming deadline. For PhD students, understanding this timeline helps you plan your experimental schedule and avoid being forced to wait six months after missing a submission window. Note that if you're using the ARR mechanism, you'll need to budget an additional 6–8 weeks for the review period plus each conference's commitment deadline, so preparation should start even earlier.

Tip: The dates above reflect general patterns. Specific deadlines vary each year, so always check the official announcements.

Choosing a Conference Is About More Than Ratings

While CORE A*/A ratings are an important reference, you should also consider the following factors when selecting a target conference:

Topic alignment: EMNLP leans toward empirical research, ACL toward comprehensive innovation, and CoNLL toward computational modeling of language. Choosing a conference that matches your research direction increases your acceptance probability, and reviewers are more likely to appreciate the value of your work. For example, a study on large-scale pre-training methodology improvements might receive more expert reviews at NeurIPS or ICML, while computational modeling research targeting specific linguistic phenomena would be better suited for ACL or EMNLP.
Community influence: Certain conferences have more concentrated audiences in specific subfields (e.g., dialogue systems, machine translation, information extraction), and submitting there yields more targeted academic feedback. For instance, SIGdial focuses on dialogue systems, and WMT (Workshop on Machine Translation) is the authoritative evaluation platform for machine translation.
Review mechanism differences: ARR's rolling review allows authors to revise and resubmit after receiving feedback, making it more accommodating for papers that need iterative refinement. ICLR's open review lets you gauge community attitudes toward similar work in advance. Traditional single-round review mechanisms (such as AAAI and IJCAI) require papers to be at a high level of completion upon submission, since authors typically have only one limited rebuttal opportunity to address reviewer concerns.

Submission Strategies for Researchers at Different Stages

For Newcomers: Build Experience Before Aiming for Top Venues

If you're just entering the NLP field, there's no need to immediately target main conferences like ACL or EMNLP, which have acceptance rates below 25%. A more pragmatic approach is:

Start with Findings (a secondary publication track affiliated with ACL/EMNLP). Paper quality requirements are close to the main conference, but competition is somewhat less intense. Findings was first introduced by ACL for EMNLP in 2020 and later expanded to ACL, NAACL, and other conferences. It was created in response to surging submission volumes — thousands of papers compete for limited main conference slots each year, and many qualified papers that aren't accepted due to capacity constraints must be resubmitted elsewhere. Findings papers undergo the same rigorous peer review, are included in ACL Anthology (the most authoritative paper database in computational linguistics), and receive formal DOI numbers with equal standing in academic citations. The main difference is that Findings papers typically don't receive oral presentation or poster slots at the main conference, resulting in relatively lower visibility in academic networking contexts.
Participate in high-quality Workshops, such as the topical workshops affiliated with ACL, to gain peer review experience. While workshop papers don't carry the same formal rating as main conference papers, they help you become familiar with academic writing standards and review processes, and build your academic network.
After receiving feedback and making improvements, submit your mature work to main conferences.

For Industry Engineers: Focus on Application-Oriented Publication Channels

Industry values practical utility and dissemination efficiency. Conferences like EMNLP and NeurIPS not only provide academic recognition — their Industry Tracks and related workshops are also ideal platforms for showcasing applied results. Industry Tracks typically have different requirements from the main conference — they emphasize real-world deployment experience, solutions to engineering challenges, and practical insights from large-scale systems, rather than purely theoretical or methodological innovation. Additionally, AAAI's Innovative Applications of AI conference (IAAI) is worth noting, as it specifically targets innovative AI application cases and requires papers to demonstrate the deployment and effectiveness of AI technology in real-world scenarios.

Conclusion: Finding the Right Stage for Your Research

Returning to the original question — beyond EMNLP, the NLP field offers a rich array of top conferences to choose from every year. The key isn't "which conference ranks highest," but rather building a clear submission timeline and precisely matching your research to the right conference positioning.

In an era of rapidly iterating large language models, getting your results to the right venue in a timely manner is more critical than ever. Researchers are advised to bookmark conference deadline tracking websites like aideadlin.es to stay updated on the latest schedules for major conferences, keeping your research rhythm in sync with the pulse of the field.