EACL 2027 Industry Track Call for Papers

Background

Language technologies and their applications are an integral and critical part of our daily lives. Many of these technologies have their roots in academic and industrial laboratories where researchers invented a plethora of algorithms, benchmarked them against shared datasets and perfected their performance to provide plausible solutions to real-world applications. While a controlled laboratory setting is vital for a deeper scientific understanding of the problems underlying language technologies and the impact of algorithmic design choices on their performance, transitioning the technology to real-world industrial strength applications raises a different, yet challenging, set of technical issues.

The EACL 2027 Industry Track aims to highlight this mutual influence of language technology in academia and industry, which has significantly contributed to the proliferation of industry applications. The track - following the tradition of related industry track series at EACL, NAACL, ACL and EMNLP - provides the opportunity for researchers, engineers, practitioners and users to meet and discuss the latest language technologies methods as deployed in a real-world setting and aims to be the premier forum for knowledge sharing across the boundary between academia and industry.

We invite submissions describing innovations and implementations in all areas of speech and natural language processing technologies and systems that are relevant to real-word applications. The primary focus of this track is on papers that advance the understanding of, and demonstrate the effective handling of, practical issues related to the deployment of language processing technologies in real-world use application. We encourage submissions from industry, non-profit, government, and public-sector organisations, with the understanding that the end-users of these systems extend beyond the NLP community. Please note that if submissions involve proprietary data, there is no requirement to make this data available.

Given the wider scale deployment of language technologies, this year’s edition particularly welcomes work that addresses the operational maturity of real-world systems — including longitudinal studies of systems in production, the evolution of evaluation and testing practices as deployments shift from deterministic automation toward ML- and LLM-based components, and experiences with data and model governance.

Important Dates (23:59 AoE)

  • Paper submission deadline: 11 September 2026
  • Reviews released: 21 October 2026
  • Rebuttal ends: 4 November 2026
  • Meta Reviews released: 30 November 2026
  • Notification of acceptance: 18 December 2026
  • Camera-ready due: 6 January 2027
  • Main conference (including Industry Track): 9-14 March 2027

Following the ACL and ARR policies, there is no anonymity period requirement. Papers can be posted on arXiv or other online repositories at any time.

Submission link: https://openreview.net/group?id=eacl.org/EACL/2027/Industry_Track

Topics

The EACL 2027 Industry Track provides the opportunity to highlight key insights and new research challenges that arise from the development and deployment of real-world applications using language technologies.

Relevant areas include system design, efficiency, maintainability, and scalability of real-world applications, with topics including but not limited to:

  • Benchmarks and methods for improving latency and efficiency of systems, including cost, latency, and efficiency of LLM/LM training and inference at scale
  • Continuous maintenance and improvement of deployed systems, including longitudinal studies of AI/NLP systems in production (performance drift, maintenance burden, and lifecycle management)
  • Enabling infrastructure for large-scale deployment
  • Human-in-the-loop approaches to application development
  • Implementation at speed, scale, or low-cost
  • System combinations
  • Evaluation, testing, and quality-assurance requirements and procedures for LLM-based components
  • Data and model governance procedures for deployed systems, including versioning strategies, lineage, access control, auditing, and compliance
  • Citizen-facing systems and public services, including challenges from multilingual, procurement and regulatory constraints

Novel applications and use cases, including but not limited to:

  • Best practices, lessons learned, or vision pieces on deploying real-world applications
  • Case studies, from design to deployment
  • Description of an application or system
  • Design of application-relevant datasets
  • Development of methods under system constraints
  • Novel NLP applications

Methods for deployed systems, including but not limited to:

  • Ethics, bias, fairness, and harmlessness
  • Interactive systems
  • Interpretability
  • Offline/online system evaluation methodologies
  • Online learning
  • Robustness and reliability of systems in production

Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind manner and assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, and clarity. Submissions to the industry track should emphasize real-world implementations of natural language processing systems, the development of such systems, or provide insights based on real-world datasets with obvious industry impact. For papers that rely heavily on empirical evaluations, the experimental methods and results should be clear, well executed, and reproducible (though the data may be proprietary).

Paper Submission

Authors are invited to submit original papers that are not previously published, accepted to be published, or under consideration for publication in any other forum.

  • Submission system: Papers are submitted via the EACL 2027 Industry Track system (https://openreview.net/group?id=eacl.org/EACL/2027/Industry_Track).
  • Formatting: Manuscripts should be submitted electronically, in PDF format and formatted using the templates available here. Please do not modify these style files, nor should you use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review.
  • Length: Industry Track papers cannot exceed 6 pages in length; however, references and limitations sections do not count toward the page limit, nor do the following optional sections: acknowledgments (only in the final version), ethical considerations, and appendices.
  • Limitations: Authors are required to discuss the limitations of their work in a dedicated section titled “Limitations”. This section should be included at the end of the paper, before the references, and it will not count toward the page limit. Papers without a limitations section will be desk rejected.
  • Appendices: Appendices must appear in the main paper’s PDF, after the bibliography. Submissions must remain fully self-contained; appendices are optional and reviewers are not required to review or download them.
  • Supplementary materials: Authors may submit separate files as supplementary materials, such as software or data.
  • Anonymization for review: Submissions, appendices, and supplementary materials must not include authors’ names or affiliations. Self-references that reveal identities must be avoided. Avoid links to non-anonymized repositories; use anonymized GitHub or Anonym Share instead.
  • Citation & comparison: Cite all refereed publications relevant to the submission. Recent, unpublished work may be excluded. Preprints superseded by refereed publications should cite the latter. See ACL Policies for Review and Citation.
  • Writing assistance: The EACL 2027 Industry Track adheres to the ACL policy on using writing assistants, detailed here.
  • Camera-ready version: Accepted papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 7 pages; ethical considerations, acknowledgments, limitations, and references do not count against this limit), so that reviewers’ comments can be considered. Previous presentations of the work (e.g., arXiv preprints) should be indicated in a footnote that must be excluded from the review submission, but included in the final version of papers appearing in the proceedings. The final version should remove anonymization in text, citation, and figures. For example, the final version may include the name of the authors’ institutions, trade names, and screenshots of identifiable products.
  • Presentation: All accepted papers must be presented at the conference (onsite or online). The EACL 2027 Industry Track will run in parallel with the Main Conference Track. Papers will be presented as oral talks or posters, and both will be published indistinguishably in a dedicated proceedings. Presentation mode is based on the nature of the work, not its quality.
  • Authorship: Author lists must reflect all and only those who contributed significantly to the work. No changes to authorship can be made after the submission deadline.

Multiple Submission Policy

EACL 2027 Industry Track will not consider any paper that is under review in a journal or another conference at the time of submission, and submitted papers must not be submitted elsewhere during the EACL 2027 Industry Track review period. This policy covers all refereed and archival conferences and workshops (e.g., NeurIPS, ACL workshops), as well as ARR. In addition, we will not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere. Authors submitting more than one paper to the EACL 2027 Industry Track must ensure that their submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.

Submissions of identical or closely related work to multiple EACL 2027 tracks (e.g. main conference or Industry Track) will be treated as duplicate submissions. Such submissions violating our multiple submission policy will be rejected without review. The authors should also include the papers that their paper overlaps or extends in the references section as follows: Anonymous Authors, “Title of the paper”, Under submission at EACL 2027 (TRACK NAME).

Ethics Policy

Authors are required to honor the ethical code set out in the ACL Code of Ethics. The consideration of the ethical impact of our research, use of data, and potential applications of our work has always been an important consideration, and as artificial intelligence is becoming more mainstream, these issues are increasingly pertinent. We ask that all authors read the code, and ensure that their work is conformant to this code. Where a paper may raise ethical issues, we ask that you include in the paper an explicit discussion of these issues, which will be taken into account in the review process. We reserve the right to reject papers on ethical grounds, where the authors are judged to have operated counter to the code of ethics, or have inadequately addressed legitimate ethical concerns with their work.

Authors will be allowed extra space after the 6th page for an optional broader impact statement or other discussion of ethics. The EACL 2027 Industry Track review form will include a section addressing these issues and papers flagged for ethical concerns by reviewers or ACs will be further reviewed by an ethics committee. Note that an ethical considerations section is not required, but papers working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks that do not discuss these issues will not be accepted. Conversely, the mere inclusion of an ethical considerations section does not guarantee acceptance. In addition to acceptance or rejection, papers may receive a conditional acceptance recommendation. Camera-ready versions of papers designated as conditional accept will be re-reviewed by the ethics committee to determine whether the concerns have been adequately addressed. Please read the ethics FAQ for more guidance on some problems to look out for and key concerns to consider relative to the code of ethics.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the EACL 2027 Industry Track only for participants from industry?

No, the industry track welcomes participants from the entire ACL community. Researchers working on real-world applications that match the industry track call for papers are invited to submit papers. Everyone is welcome to attend industry track sessions.

Can academics and students also submit papers to industry track?

Yes. Consider submitting a paper to the industry track if your work matches the industry track call for papers.

I work in industry. Can I still submit my paper to the main conference track?

Absolutely. The industry track offers a forum to submit papers describing aspects of real-world applications that may differ in focus from the main conference track reviewing criteria.

What do you mean by real-world applications?

Real-world applications those deployed or expected to be deployed for real-world use, i.e. outside controlled environments such as laboratories, classrooms or experimental crowd-sourced setups.

Will the papers in the Industry Track be published in the proceedings?
Yes, industry track papers will be published as a separate volume of the proceedings. For example, see ACL 2025 Industry Track proceedings.

How do I decide whether to submit to the main conference or the Industry Track?
Authors are advised to review all calls for papers and submit to the call that best matches your work. The list of topics and reviewing criteria may be helpful. For example, papers best suited for the industry track include those describing language technology systems, key lessons learned or challenges from their deployment or experiments on proprietary data.

If you still need help deciding, feel free to reach out to the track chairs.

Chairs and Contact

  • Matthias Gallé (Poolside)
  • Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro (Bloomberg)
  • Elena Kochkina (JPMorganChase)

Email: eacl2027-industry-track@googlegroups.com