We plan on updating the FAQ continuously

Why is COLING happening in January 2025? Wasn’t there a COLING in May 2024?

The short answer is: COLING has always (since 1976 in Bergen) been held on even years, but it has now been shifted to odd years (see below for an explanation of why). In 2025, it will take place in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Because of various factors, including the schedule of other NLP conferences such as EACL, extreme weather conditions in the summer months, and Ramadan’s timing in 2025, the only possible month is January.

Who is in charge of the COLING conferences?

COLING is governed by the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL). The ICCL is not a membership organization, but rather a board of senior researchers in computational linguistics and NLP. The ICCL chooses a local organizer for each conference, and the general chairs. The general chairs then choose other chairs.

What is the history of COLING?

COLING first took place in 1968 (in New York City), and is therefore almost as old as ACL. For more details, see the Wiki page.

How is COLING different from ACL conferences?

COLING Coling conferences are traditionally more open to linguistic content, including understanding human language and language use.

What are the financial arrangements at a COLING conference?

Unlike ACL, COLING and the ICCL have no organizational structure and no bank account. The finances for each conference are entirely managed by the local organizers. For COLING 2025, the local organizers are Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.

Why was COLING joined with LREC in 2024?

The first LREC took place in 1998 in Granada, Spain. It was founded specifically to create a forum for language resources, as the growth in NLP based in machine learning required more extensive resources for training and testing. LREC, like COLING, also takes place every two years, and both conferences took place in the same year from 1998 to 2024. In the interest of avoiding this clash, the governing boards of the two conferences (ELDA for LREC, and ICCL for COLING) decided to move COLING to odd years, and to mark the transition with a joint conference.

Will COLING and LREC always be a joint conference?

No, on the contrary, they will never be together again. The joint conference in 2024 was a one-time event. In 2025 and in the future, COLING will again be a stand-alone conference, and the nature of COLING will again be like previous COLING conferences before the joint conference in 2024.

What will the acceptance rate be for the main track at COLING 2025?

We cannot say now of course, since it depends on many factors, but we point to the acceptance rates of past COLING conferences as a rough guide: around 30%.

Is it possible to add authors or change the order of the authors for the final version of a paper?

It is possible to change the order of the authors for the final version. Adding authors to a paper is not allowed.

Do camera-ready versions of the papers get an extra page?

Yes, final versions of accepted papers are given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages for long papers, up to 5 pages for short papers) to address reviewers’ comments.