EMNLP Statement on the Paper Integrity Policy

Desk rejections for submissions with unverifiable references have been sent to impacted authors in accordance with the EMNLP 2026 Paper Integrity Policy announced in the EMNLP 2026 Call for Papers. In total, we rejected 258 submissions written by 1,166 authors. The authors were also informed about the reference(s) that caused their paper to be desk rejected. This statement describes the process we followed and the sanctions, which will also apply to EMNLP 2026 camera-ready papers.

The process for desk rejecting papers followed two routes: (i) reviewers or ARR Area Chairs reported unverifiable references themselves; or (ii) unverifiable references were automatically identified by GTPZero and manually checked by ARR Area Chairs. Papers were desk rejected if references broke either of these criteria: (a) there was at least one reference to a paper that did not exist with the given title; or (b) at least three references had major errors in their author lists, where >=50% of the authors did not match the expected reference. The final decisions were made by either an EMNLP Program Chair or ARR May 2026 Cycle Editor-in-Chief.

We sanctioned all 1,166 authors by preventing them from committing their desk rejected papers to EMNLP 2026. We will also recommend an additional sanction to the EMNLP 2027 Program Chairs to prevent the 35 authors with multiple desk rejected papers from committing any papers to the EMNLP 2027 conference. These sanctions were discussed with and approved by the SIGDAT Executive Leadership. Desk rejected submissions have also been forwarded to the ACL Publications Ethics Committee.

Authors that want to appeal against the additional sanction can complete an appeal form by November 7th, 2026. They will receive further details about this process in the coming weeks. Their appeal must clearly demonstrate that a flagged reference is indeed verifiable in the exact form that it appeared in the desk rejected paper.

We regret that we needed to take this action, but we hope the community understands our decision to take steps to uphold the integrity of the papers published at the conference. We want to thank the reviewers that identified unverifiable references themselves and the ARR Area Chairs for their efforts in checking the GPTZero predictions.

Sunipa Dev, Desmond Elliott, Hung-yi Lee, Jessy Li
EMNLP 2026 Program Chairs