At ACL 2026 (The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics; July 2–7, 2026, San Diego, USA), widely regarded as the world's foremost international conference in natural language processing and computational linguistics, a total of 20 papers co-authored by NII researchers were accepted. Two of these received awards recognizing outstanding work.
Best Theme Paper : “Mapping the Circumplex of Affect: Geometric Analysis of Emotion Representations via Hyperspherical Contrastive Learning” Yusuke Yamauchi (University of Tokyo / Research Assistant, Aizawa Laboratory, NII); Akiko Aizawa (Professor, Digital Content and Media Sciences Research Division, NII)
https://www.nii.ac.jp/en/news/award/2026/0707-1.html
Outstanding Paper : “CxMP: A Linguistic Minimal-Pair Benchmark for Evaluating Constructional Understanding in Language Models” Miyu Oba (Nara Institute of Science and Technology / former Research Assistant, Sugawara Laboratory, NII); Saku Sugawara (Assistant Professor, Digital Content and Media Sciences Research Division, NII)
https://www.nii.ac.jp/en/news/award/2026/0707-2.html
In addition, the paper “The Imperfective Paradox in Large Language Models”, co-authored by Yusuke Miyao (Project Professor, Research and Development Center for Large Language Models, NII / University of Tokyo), was selected for a Best Paper Award, the conference's highest honor.
ACL 2026 received a record 12,148 submissions (up approximately 45% year on year). With 2,296 papers accepted to the main conference (acceptance rate 18.9%) and 2,163 accepted to Findings (17.8%), competition was intense — making these 20 acceptances and two awards a notable achievement.
[Background and Challenges]
With the rapid spread of large language models (LLMs), there is growing importance in research that explains "why a model produces a given answer" (explainability), as well as in methods for rigorously evaluating language understanding. ACL 2026 featured "Explainability of NLP Models" as a special theme, and NII's award-winning papers sit at the core of this trend.
[Social Significance and Future Outlook]
These achievements form a foundation for realizing trustworthy AI. With the Research and Development Center for Large Language Models (LLMC) at its core, NII will continue to advance research and development on transparent and explainable AI.
[List of Accepted Papers]
NII authors are shown in bold; ★ indicates an award-winning paper.
Main Conference: 13 papers
Findings: 4 papers
Industry Track: 1 paper
Student Research Workshop: 2 papers