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.

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 (or speech) processing technologies in real-world use applications, i.e., outside controlled environments such as laboratories, classrooms or experimental crowd-sourced setups. We encourage submissions from both non-profit and for-profit sectors, 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.

Important Dates (23:59 AoE)

  • Paper submission deadline: 17 November 2025
  • Notification of acceptance: 5 January 2026
  • Camera-ready due: 19 January 2026
  • Main conference (including Industry Track): 24-29 March 2026

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: to be announced

Topics

The EACL 2026 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
  • Continuous maintenance and improvement of deployed systems
  • Efficient methods for training and inference
  • Enabling infrastructure for large-scale deployment
  • Human-in-the-loop approaches to application development
  • Implementation at speed, scale, or low-cost
  • System combination

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 (model or data size)
  • Novel NLP applications

Methods for deployed systems (alphabetical; including but not limited to):

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

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 (or speech) 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 2026 Industry Track system (link TBA).

  • 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 2026 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 2026 Industry Track will run in parallel with the Main Conference Track. Papers will be presented as oral talks or posters, with no distinction in the 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 2026 Industry Track will not consider submissions that are under review elsewhere or submitted to multiple tracks. Duplicate submissions or those with significant overlap (>25%) with other submissions will be rejected. Any related submissions must be cited in the following format: Anonymous Authors, Title of the paper, Under submission at EACL 2026 (TRACK NAME).

Ethics Policy

Authors must follow the ACL Code of Ethics. Ethical impact, use of data, and application of work must be carefully considered. Optional ethics discussion (not counting towards the 6-page limit) is encouraged, especially for sensitive topics. Papers raising ethical concerns may undergo additional ethics committee review. See ethics FAQ for guidance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the EACL 2026 Industry Track only for participants from industry?
No. The track welcomes all researchers with relevant work.

Can academics and students also submit papers to the Industry Track?
Yes, if their work aligns with the Industry Track call.

I work in industry. Can I still submit my paper to the main conference track?
Yes. Choose the track that best fits the focus of your paper.

What do you mean by “real-world applications”?
Systems deployed or expected to be deployed for real-world use (outside labs, classrooms, etc.).

Will the papers in the Industry Track be published in the proceedings?
Yes, in a dedicated volume. (For example, see ACL 2025 Industry Track proceedings.)

How do I decide whether to submit to the main conference or the Industry Track?
Review both calls; if in doubt, contact the Industry Track Chairs.

Chairs and Contact

Email: eacl2026-industry@googlegroups.com