# EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Phase 1 seed venue per `dec_01KS0BKJ5ZJKJ4R19GYAK3QN9D` Q3 (NLP domain).

## 1. Section names and order

Typical EMNLP Long Paper structure (five to seven sections):

1. Introduction
2. Related Work
3. Method (or "Approach", "Model")
4. Experiments (or "Experimental Setup")
5. Results (or "Results and Analysis")
6. Discussion (optional; some authors fold into Results)
7. Conclusion
8. Limitations (**required** since 2022; uncounted toward page limit)
9. Ethics Statement (encouraged; uncounted)
10. References

Subsections at depth 2 are standard; depth 3 acceptable but uncommon.

## 2. Page-limit class

EMNLP page limits (verify against the current CFP):

- Long paper: 8 pages main matter, uncounted references, uncounted Limitations, uncounted Ethics, uncounted Appendix.
- Short paper: 4 pages main matter, same uncounted sections.
- Camera-ready: gains one additional page (e.g., 9 for long, 5 for short).

References are uncounted (typical for ACL-family venues).

## 3. Tone characteristics

- First-person plural ("we") is standard.
- Numerical claims are expected; ablation and statistical-significance reporting are standard.
- Hedging is moderate. Strong claims acceptable when supported by experiments.
- Math density is moderate to high. Equations are first-class.
- Tables of results are dense; multi-column comparison tables are standard.
- Bibliography is large (60-100 references typical for long papers).

## 4. Forbidden constructions

- `we propose a novel ...` (overused; ACL-family reviewers flag).
- `state-of-the-art` (overused; prefer specific metric numbers).
- Unqualified claims of "best" or "superior" without head-to-head comparison.
- Single-seed experimental claims (run multiple seeds; report variance).
- Em-dash characters U+2014 and U+2013 (Writer dogfood rule).

These are venue-specific anti-patterns layered on top of the universal Anti-AI-tic enforcement.

## 5. Citation style

Name-year via natbib's `\citep{}` / `\citet{}` macros, set by the `acl` style. Examples:

- `\citep{vaswani2017attention}` produces `(Vaswani et al., 2017)`.
- `\citet{vaswani2017attention}` produces `Vaswani et al. (2017)`.
- `\citep[see][]{vaswani2017attention}` produces `(see Vaswani et al., 2017)`.

References list alphabetical by first author, then chronological.

## 6. Required sections

- **Introduction**: motivation, problem framing, contribution claims, brief result preview.
- **Related Work**: positions against prior literature.
- **Method**: detailed enough that another researcher could replicate; include hyperparameters, model architecture, training details.
- **Experiments**: datasets, baselines, evaluation metrics.
- **Results**: main table plus ablations.
- **Limitations**: **mandatory** since 2022 EMNLP. Discuss scope, dataset biases, generalization concerns. Uncounted but expected.
- **Ethics Statement**: encouraged; mandatory for certain topic areas (e.g., low-resource languages, dual-use, demographic data). Uncounted.
- **References**: alphabetical, complete bibliography.

Reproducibility checklist: EMNLP encourages a Reproducibility Checklist (uncounted appendix item). Templates available from acl-org.

## 7. Sample corpus pointers

For tone calibration, scaffold three to five recent EMNLP papers from the prior two years. Sample queries:

- `https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=primary_location.source.id:<EMNLP-source-id>,publication_year:2025` (verify EMNLP source ID at scaffold time).
- Sample across topic areas: encoder-decoder modeling, evaluation studies, low-resource language work, dataset papers.

Store as `lit_` entries with `tags=["venue-sample:EMNLP", "venue-sample"]`.

## Notes on acl-style-files

ACL style files (`acl-style-files` repository at github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files) are MIT-licensed but venue policy forbids modification. Configuration via package options only:

```latex
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[review]{acl}            % for review submission with line numbers
% \usepackage[]{acl}                % for camera-ready (no review option)
\usepackage{times}
\usepackage{latexsym}
\usepackage{url}
```

Engine: pdflatex only. xelatex and lualatex trigger font-loading failures with the default ACL fonts. The `.latexmkrc` should pin `LATEX_ENGINE=pdflatex` for EMNLP manuscripts.

Anonymization: pre-camera-ready submissions must be anonymized. The `[review]` option enables line numbers required for reviewer comments. Author block is suppressed under `[review]` and surfaced under camera-ready.

## Bib format

`refs.bib` uses BibTeX format (not biblatex). Standard fields: `@inproceedings{...}` for conference papers, `@article{...}` for journals, `@misc{...}` for preprints. Use the `url=` field for arXiv preprints (`url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01234}`).

`bibtex-tidy` invocation suitable for EMNLP `refs.bib`:

```bash
bibtex-tidy --curly --numeric --sort=key --duplicates=key,doi --escape --tidy-comments --remove-empty-fields --enclosing-braces=title refs.bib
```

## References

- ACL Anthology (canonical bibliography source): https://aclanthology.org/
- EMNLP Call for Papers (verify per year): https://www.emnlp.org/
- ACL style files: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files
- ACL Reproducibility Checklist: https://aclrollingreview.org/responsibleNLPresearch/
