Tags: * move ACL's focus from conferences to journals
There is a broader (and dual) issue behind many of these challenges: the primacy of conferences as publication
venues, and the incremental nature of the majority of both submissions and papers. It is worth considering
how we can, over time, raise our standards and expectations of what goes into an *ACL paper (and how
much each paper is worth in performance assessment) to reduce the number of papers that are written.
One valuable direction to consider is refocusing the community on TACL, CL, and other NLP journals,
with a focus on publication in journals and presentation at conferences (as is done in many other fields).
This would allow for larger papers and longer, (arguably) better-quality review processes, while maintaining
the conferences as the hub for discussion and networking. The current conference-first approach is not
only unsustainable, but it actively harms the field by emphasizing many incremental submissions in a
short timespan, and harms each paper by making it harder to be seen.