Association for Computational Linguistics

Scholarly migration study finds NLP research gravitating away from ACL toward general ML venues post-LLM era

A new arXiv preprint analyzes publication patterns in NLP from 2010 to 2026, finding a significant shift away from traditional ACL venues toward general ML conferences. Established NLP authors lost 19.2 percentage points of share at flagship ACL main tracks while newer authors publishing primarily at ACL venues dropped from 84% (2019) to 74% (2024), with general ML venue share rising from 5% to 21%. The authors use causal inference to estimate that general ML venues confer a citation premium that drives venue selection. The findings suggest the disciplinary center of gravity for NLP research is migrating toward broader ML communities, likely accelerated by LLM advances.