| name | acl-related-work |
| description | Use when positioning an ACL submission against the NLP literature, covering ACL Anthology citation practice, arXiv-versus-published version citation, concurrent LLM-era preprints, prior-cycle ARR resubmission overlap, anonymity-preserving self-citation, and the fast-moving baseline problem in computational linguistics. |
ACL Related Work
Use this to audit positioning and citation hygiene. NLP moves fast enough that
related-work sections age between ARR cycles; the section must prove the
authors know the field as of this cycle, not as of the project's start.
The Anthology-first rule
- When a paper exists in the ACL Anthology (or another archival venue), cite
that version, not its arXiv preprint — Anthology entries are the community's
citation of record and carry stable BibTeX.
- The Anthology is fully open access (post-2016 materials under CC BY 4.0),
so "couldn't access the published version" is never a defense here.
- For findings-tier work, cite it as Findings of ACL/EMNLP — it is archival
and reviewers treat miscrediting it as sloppiness.
Freshness pressure unique to this field
- Expect at least one reviewer to name a baseline or dataset from the last
two conference rounds. Sweep ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, TACL, and CL for the
nearest neighbors published since your project began.
- LLM-era concurrency is the norm: assume 2-4 similar preprints exist. Cite
the ones findable at submission, contrast on technique rather than date,
and avoid priority wars that reviewers cannot adjudicate.
- If a newer model release makes your comparison set look dated mid-cycle,
address it in the author response and plan the upgrade for camera-ready or
resubmission — silence reads as unawareness.
Positioning moves that work at ACL
| Contribution type | The contrast reviewers want spelled out |
|---|
| Method | Nearest prior method + the mechanism-level difference, not just scores |
| Resource | Existing datasets' coverage gaps: languages, domains, phenomena, license |
| Analysis / evaluation | What prior evaluations measured incorrectly or could not see |
| Metric | Failure cases of the incumbent metric, with correlation evidence |
| Theme-track paper | How the work answers the year's theme question (ACL 2026: explainability) |
One paragraph of typed contrast per lane beats an undifferentiated citation
inventory; ACL's compressed format cannot afford taxonomy for its own sake.
Self-citation and resubmission overlap
- Cite your own prior work in third person ("Building on Smith (2024)...")
so anonymity survives; heavy reliance on one group's unpublished thread is
itself an anonymity leak.
- If this is an ARR resubmission, the revision note — not the related-work
section — is where you discuss the previous version; the paper itself
should read cleanly to a fresh reviewer.
- Workshop and non-archival versions (most *ACL workshops are archival —
check!) must be declared under the dual-submission policy rather than
quietly extended.
Preprint-era eligibility judgment calls
- Your own arXiv preprint of this submission is allowed (no anonymity period
since January 2024), but the declared preprint status must match reality.
- A competing preprint that appeared after your ARR submission date is
concurrent work: cite it in camera-ready, note the timing, contrast honestly.
- Do not cite an inaccessible or anonymized document as supporting evidence —
ARR forbids leaning on materials reviewers cannot read.
Two-pass audit procedure
Pass 1 (coverage): for each claim of novelty, list the 3 nearest works
from Anthology search + recent cycles; verify each is cited and
contrasted, not just listed.
Pass 2 (hygiene): for each bib entry, check venue-of-record vs arXiv,
Findings attribution, third-person self-citation, and that no cited
item is reviewer-inaccessible.
Where to actually search, in order
- ACL Anthology full-text/venue search — the canonical record for every
*ACL main conference, Findings volume, TACL, CL, and most workshops.
- The most recent two conference rounds' accepted-paper lists (each
edition's site publishes them) — the freshness sweep reviewers run.
- Semantic Scholar / Google Scholar citation graphs walked forward from
your three nearest neighbors — who already built on them?
- arXiv cs.CL for the concurrent-preprint scan, dated against your cycle's
submission deadline so "concurrent" is defensible.
- Leaderboards and dataset pages for your benchmarks — the SOTA row often
names an uncited system.
Related-work paragraph shape that survives compression
For each literature lane, three sentences: (1) what the lane established,
with its two or three best citations; (2) the specific gap or assumption it
left; (3) how this paper differs mechanically. Delete any sentence that
neither cites nor contrasts. In a short paper, the whole section may be one
such paragraph plus contrasts woven into the introduction — that is normal
and reviewers at ACL expect it.
Red flags reviewers name explicitly
- "The authors seem unaware of X" — the fatal version of staleness; one
missed obvious neighbor outweighs fifty dutiful citations.
- Citing a paper for a claim it does not make (checked more often than
authors expect, since reviewers know their own subfield's papers).
- A wall of "recently, LLMs have..." citations with no load-bearing role.
- Comparing against numbers from a cited paper's arXiv v1 that changed in
the published version.
Output format
[Positioning verdict] sharp / inventory-like / stale / overlapping
[Nearest neighbors] <3 works -> stated distinction each>
[Freshness risks] <recent baselines or datasets unaddressed>
[Citation hygiene] <arXiv-vs-Anthology, Findings credit, self-citation voice>
[Overlap declarations] <resubmission / workshop / preprint items to declare>
