Overview

The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022) invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research on empirical methods for Natural Language Processing. As in recent years, some of the presentations at the conference will be for papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL (TACL) and Computational Linguistics (CL) journals.

EMNLP 2022 will follow EMNLP 2021 and go with a hybrid format with respect to ARR. This means that while EMNLP will accept ARR-reviewed papers, it will also accept submissions directly to EMNLP through the START system.

However, in order to keep the review load on the community as a whole manageable, we need to ask authors to decide up-front if they want to be reviewed through ARR or EMNLP.

Review Process:

Papers submitted directly to EMNLP will have the “regular” review process: paper reviewed by 3 reviewers, authors are invited to write an author response and revise their paper before the camera ready deadline, if accepted. ARR papers committed to EMNLP will be handled by the Senior Area Chairs. For these papers, the authors may provide an author response but not revise their paper (with the exception of adding the required “limitations” section, if it was missing from the ARR submission; see below).

Cross Submission Policy with ARR

  • Any ARR-reviewed paper that got all of its reviews and meta-reviews available by the ARR-to-conference submission deadline (July 24, 2022), can be committed to EMNLP 2022.
    • Note: submissions from ARR cannot be modified except that they can be associated with an author response.
    • Note: While EMNLP will consider any ARR paper that has been fully reviewed by July 24, 2022, unlike in ACL and NAACL, ARR does not guarantee a date such that all papers submitted to ARR before the date are guaranteed to receive necessary reviews in time for the EMNLP deadline. Consequently, care must be taken in deciding whether a submission should be made to ARR or EMNLP directly if the work has not been submitted anywhere before the call. Plan accordingly.
    • Note: The START system deadline for direct submission papers, namely non-ARR submission papers, is June 24, 2022.
  • Papers submitted to ARR before May 24, 2022, can be withdrawn and submitted to EMNLP 2022.
    • Note: In order for a paper to be submitted directly to EMNLP 2022, it must be fully removed from the ARR system, either by explicit withdrawal by the authors, or because the ARR reviews were finished and shared with the authors before May 24, and the paper was not re-submitted to ARR.
    • Note: The authors can withdrawn from ARR by May 24, 2022, regardless of how many reviews they have received.

  • Papers that are in the ARR system after May 24, 2022, either submitted after or submitted before and not withdrawn, cannot be submitted to EMNLP 2022.

  • Papers submitted to EMNLP 2022 may not be submitted for review elsewhere (including ARR) while being under review at EMNLP 2022.

Major differences from “standard” recent conferences include:

  • Hybrid ARR + EMNLP models.
  • Mandatory discussion of limitations.
  • Theme: “Open questions, major obstacles, and unresolved issues in NLP”