About the conference
ACL is the premier venue in natural language processing, and — in the LLM era — one of the most-watched conferences in all of computer science. Its sibling meetings EMNLP and NAACL share the community and the reviewing infrastructure.
Submission works differently from most fields: papers go to ACL Rolling Review (ARR), a continuous reviewing pool with roughly monthly-to-cyclical deadlines, and authors then "commit" reviewed papers to a specific conference by its commitment deadline. For the main summer meeting, the relevant ARR cycle has recently fallen around February — but the ARR calendar, not a single conference deadline, is what to track.