ACL vs EMNLP vs LREC: Which to attend?
ACL vs EMNLP vs LREC: Which NLP Conference Should You Attend?
In the natural language processing community, three names consistently dominate the calendar: ACL, EMNLP, and LREC. Each has its own personality, research emphasis and acceptance profile.
ACL (Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics)
Focus: ACL is the flagship conference in computational linguistics. It attracts submissions from across the spectrum,from theoretical and linguistic analysis to cutting‑edge machine‑learning methods. Recent editions have highlighted large language models, ethics and fairness, multilingual representations, and formal semantics.
Acceptance Rate & Size: ACL is highly selective. In 2021 there were around 3,350 submissions; roughly 710 papers were accepted to the main conference (about 21 % acceptance). In 2022, out of ~3,378 submissions, 701 main‑track papers were accepted (~20 % acceptance). Attendance is large,typically several thousand attendees (in person + virtual),reflecting its status as the premier NLP gathering.
Who It’s For: Researchers who want broad exposure to all areas of NLP, from linguistics and psycholinguistics to deep‑learning architectures and interpretability.
EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)
Focus: EMNLP leans toward empirical and statistical methods, think large language models, novel architectures, training tricks, self‑supervised learning and reproducible benchmarks. It’s the conference where new datasets, baselines and empirical discoveries often debut.
Acceptance Rate & Size: EMNLP is slightly less selective than ACL but still competitive. For example, in 2019 there were 2,914 submissions (long + short) with 683 papers accepted (≈23 % main acceptance). In 2021, 2,540 long‑paper submissions produced around 650 main‑conference papers. Attendance is comparable to ACL but often a bit smaller (a few thousand).
Who It’s For: Researchers focused on data‑driven techniques, large‑scale pre‑training, fine‑tuning, and new benchmarks. If you care about beating the state‑of‑the‑art and seeing the latest model results, EMNLP is ideal.
LREC (Language Resources and Evaluation Conference)
Focus: LREC centres on language resources and evaluation. Papers here discuss the creation of corpora, lexicons, benchmarks, annotation frameworks and evaluation metrics. It’s the place for community‑driven efforts like building datasets for under‑resourced languages, describing annotation tools, and proposing evaluation methodologies.
Acceptance Rate & Size: LREC is much more inclusive than ACL/EMNLP. Recent conferences show acceptance rates between 60 % and 70 %, for instance, in 2018 there were 1,102 submissions with 718 accepted. Earlier years (2010–2016) reported acceptance rates of 60–71. The number of attendees is typically lower than ACL/EMNLP but still substantial (roughly 1,000–1,500 participants).
Who It’s For: Anyone building or using language resources, linguists, computational linguists, data scientists and evaluators. If you work on corpora, annotation schemes, or benchmarking tasks, LREC is your conference.
Quick Comparison
| Conference | Focus | Typical Main Acceptance Rate | Approx. Attendance |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACL | Broad NLP & computational linguistics; theory + models | ~20–21 | Several thousand (flagship) |
| EMNLP | Empirical, statistical & data‑driven NLP | ~23–26 | ~3,000+ |
| LREC | Language resources & evaluation | 60–70 | ~1,000–1,500 |
Which One Should You Attend?
- Choose ACL if you want the widest view of NLP, including linguistic theory, interpretability, and algorithmic innovations.
- Choose EMNLP if you care most about empirical performance, deep learning and new benchmarks.
- Choose LREC if your work revolves around building or evaluating corpora, lexicons, datasets or benchmarking frameworks.
Each conference serves a different purpose in the NLP ecosystem. By understanding the research focus, selectivity and size, you can pick the venue that aligns with your goals.
Need help figuring out deadlines or planning your trip? Check out the ACL conference, EMNLP conference, and LREC conference for dates, locations, hotels and travel tips.