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EMNLP 2025 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research on empirical methods for Natural Language Processing.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)