AACL-IJCNLP 2026 — Asia-Pacific NLP, Hengqin

AACL-IJCNLP 2026 is the joint meeting of the 5th conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, held November 6-10, 2026 in Hengqin, Zhuhai, China. As the flagship NLP venue anchored in the Asia-Pacific region, it carries particular weight for the multilingual and cross-lingual research that the region's languages demand, and it has grown in stature as the centre of gravity in NLP shifts toward Chinese and pan-Asian research output. The 2026 edition lands at a moment when large language models dominate the field, and its topic list reflects that squarely: language modeling, LLM agents, NLP and code models, NLP and symbolic reasoning, interpretability and analysis of models, and efficient methods sit alongside the discipline's enduring pillars - machine translation, information extraction, question answering, summarization, semantics, parsing, discourse and speech. Notably, the call foregrounds human-centered NLP and human-AI interaction, ethics, bias and fairness, and computational social science, signaling that the venue takes the societal stakes of generative systems seriously. The conference runs on the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) model: rather than submitting directly, authors submit to an ARR cycle (the May 2026 cycle, shared with EMNLP 2026), receive reviews and meta-reviews, then commit accepted-quality papers to AACL.

Papers reviewed in earlier ARR cycles may also be committed. Both long and short papers are in scope, all peer-reviewed and published in the ACL Anthology, the open-access archive that makes the ACL family the most citable venues in NLP. Beyond the main track, the program includes workshops, tutorials, system demonstrations and a Student Research Workshop, the last a valuable proving ground for early-career researchers seeking mentorship and feedback. The organizing leadership draws on senior figures across the regional NLP community, with program chairs spanning institutions in mainland China, Indonesia, Singapore and Japan, underscoring the conference's genuinely pan-Asian character. Presentation options include both in-person and virtual modes, broadening access for researchers facing travel or visa constraints.

Attendees are a mix of academic NLP researchers, graduate students and industry research scientists, particularly those working on multilingual systems, low-resource languages, and the evaluation and interpretability challenges that LLMs have made urgent. For anyone whose work touches Asian languages, cross-lingual transfer, or the responsible deployment of language technology in the world's most populous region, AACL-IJCNLP 2026 is the essential venue. Practically, the key date to watch is the August 2, 2026 commitment deadline (all deadlines AoE), with acceptance notifications on September 7 and camera-ready papers due September 30 ahead of the November meeting in Hengqin.