The ACL 2026 best papers
The three award-winning papers at the 64th meeting are about aspectual semantics in language models, memory-efficient encoding in human sentence processing, and the expressivity of local attention in Transformers.
Why it matters
Computational linguistics gave its top prize this year to work about what models and people actually do, rather than about raising a score.
The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics was held from 2 to 7 July 2026 in San Diego. The three Best Papers are The Imperfective Paradox in Large Language Models by Bolei Ma and Yusuke Miyao; Memory Efficiency and Resource-Rational Encoding in Sentence Processing by Weijie Xu, Brian Dillon and Richard Futrell; and Characterizing the Expressivity of Local Attention in Transformers by Jiaoda Li and Ryan Cotterell. The conference also gave Best Theme, Best Resource, Best Social Impact, Outstanding, Best Demonstration and Student Research Workshop awards. The awards page carries no date of its own, so the record is anchored to the conference week.