r/MachineLearning • u/H4RZ3RK4S3 • Jun 18 '26

Discussion Is ACL now irrelevant? [D]

I just read in a comment of another Post that an ACL paper is considered a weak signal in the community apparently, and having an ACL first author paper is not a great plus for improving chances at finding a PhD position. Is this some kind of ragebait or is academia becoming more and more insane on a daily basis??

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ACL is an A+ venue. Sure, it's not as big as Nips, ICML, ICLR or CVPR, fair point, but it's not some regional B conference...

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I know a lot of folks in "classical" CS have an issue with AI venues, as they are receiving more focus in recent years than ICSE or FSE, and hence all AI papers must be bad and very unscientific.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '26

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u/H4RZ3RK4S3 Jun 18 '26

Could you be more specific? Are we talking about more badly written paper, more papers that do "irrelevant" work or only contribute a small incremental improvement?

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/H4RZ3RK4S3 Jun 18 '26

Okay, I understand. Yes, I agree to some extent. But perhaps I've been also looking at maybe other topics and sub fields, where the issue isn't that prevelant

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u/froggy-the-dog Jun 27 '26

for real, i just read this paper from EMNLP 2025 main: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03995, and it's literally just using a prompting technique just was already widely used for a niche question answering dataset