The list of papers accepted for ACL 2019 is now available. We would like to congratulate the authors of accepted papers – and thank all the authors for the time and effort they put into their submissions! We also want to thank our amazing Senior Area Chairs, Area Chairs and reviewers for their hard work on evaluating the papers over the past weeks and months.

Especially in light of the record number of submissions, the selection process was very competitive this year. Out of the total 2905 submissions (prior to withdrawals and desk rejects), 660 papers were finally accepted to appear in the conference, resulting in the overall acceptance rate of 22.7%. This is a little lower than the acceptance rate for ACL 2018 (24.9%) or ACL 2017 (23.3%) – yet remarkably similar when we consider the 75% increase in submissions from ACL 2018. We accepted 447 long paper and 213 short paper submissions. As in previous years, the acceptance rate is clearly higher for long papers  (25.7% vs. 18.2% for short papers), showing once again that short papers are harder to get accepted than long ones:

We can observe some interesting differences in the acceptance rates across our 22 thematic areas. The following three tables show the statistics (the number of submitted and accepted papers, along with the acceptance rate) for each of them. The first table shows the figures for all the papers, and the following two tables for the long and short papers, respectively.

Looking at the first table, the most challenging areas in terms of acceptance are Document Analysis (18.5%) and Sentence-level Semantics (19.8%), along with Information Extraction and Text Mining (20.6%), Word-level Semantics (20.7%) and Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation (20.9%).

In contrast, the area with the highest acceptance rate is Multidisciplinary and Area Chair COI (31.5%). This area handled the papers Senior Area Chairs had conflicts of interest with in their own areas. Other relatively high acceptance areas include Vision, Robotics, Multimodal Grounding and Speech (30.0%), Dialogue and Interactive Systems (28.4%) and Resources and Evaluation (28.1%).

There are also interesting differences between countries/regions (as defined by the START system). We looked at these taking into account the countries/regions of the corresponding authors of papers only (which is clearly a simplification). We have 64 countries/regions represented among the corresponding authors. The 51 with more than one submission are shown in the table. The distribution of submissions across countries/regions is too skewed for fair comparison of acceptance rates. However,  if we consider the top 15 countries in terms of the number of submissions (each with more than 30 submissions) only, the ones with the highest acceptance rates are Singapore (34.8%), Israel (34.1%), the UK (29.7%), Hong Kong (29.4%) the US (28.8%), and Germany (28.7%).

Considering the quality of the accepted papers, we are looking forward to a fantastic conference!

Don’t forget to register for ACL 2019 and to make your travel arrangements – we hope to see many of you in Florence soon!