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 so anonymity survives; heavy reliance on one group's unpublished thread is itself an anonymity leak.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

1. ACL Anthology full-text/venue search — the canonical record for every *ACL main conference, Findings volume, TACL, CL, and most workshops.
2. The most recent two conference rounds' accepted-paper lists (each edition's site publishes them) — the freshness sweep reviewers run.
3. Semantic Scholar / Google Scholar citation graphs walked forward from your three nearest neighbors — who already built on them?
4. arXiv cs.CL for the concurrent-preprint scan, dated against your cycle's submission deadline so "concurrent" is defensible.
5. 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>