ﾌմ尺Ǥ乇刀 ｷЦ乃May 26
Tito

ACL Statement on Desk Rejecting Papers with Hallucinated References

"During the final consistency checks of the camera ready versions of papers accepted to ACL 2026, we identified over 100 papers that contained citations to non-existent literature. Since these papers were going to be published and are no longer subject to the anonymity requirements, an automated system was used to identify potential citation issues and then all flagged citations were reviewed by human experts (PCs and SACs) to confirm that references did not exist. Whether human-authored or LLM-generated, the inclusion of these non-existent references is a clear violation of the ACL Policy on Publication Ethics. Consequently, we have made the decision to desk- reject these accepted papers to maintain the quality and trustworthiness of the conference proceedings."

https://2026.aclweb.org/acl_statement/

ACL Statement on Desk Rejecting Papers with Hallucinated References

Official website for the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

ACL 2026
May 25 at 10:39amWeb
Show threadggdupontMay 25
@tito
💥
Show threadarclightMay 25
@tito Could this not have been done earlier in the process? Reference checking is tedious but straightforward; easier if DOIs and ISBNs are part of the reference record. I can understand if it was a late realization or due to a process that didn't treat AI fraud as a common problem but still, it's a lot of (usually unpaid) work to shepherd papers to publication. Getting to the camera-ready stage without having checked references seems like a process problem even without AI.
Show threadsocMay 25

@tito Zero consequences for the frauds, though:

> Update: It has been decided in a meeting with
> the ACL executive that affected papers must
> go through the normal resubmission process.