EACL Related Work

Use this to build an EACL related-work section that positions the contribution rather than cataloguing the field. NLP literature moves fast and much of it is on arXiv before it is archival, so the section must be current, correctly attributed, and contrastive. Reopen the ACL Anthology and recent *ACL proceedings before finalizing.

Cite from the Anthology first

• The ACL Anthology is the canonical record for *ACL papers; cite the Anthology version (with its venue and year) rather than an arXiv preprint when both exist. This fixes venue, year, and page numbers correctly.
• For a paper that appeared in Findings, attribute it as Findings (e.g. "Findings of ACL: EACL 2026"), not as the main conference — misattributing Findings as main is a common, noticeable error.

Positioning, not listing

Weak related work	Strong related work
"X did A. Y did B. Z did C."	"Unlike X, which assumes A, we ..."
A neutral literature dump	A contrast that sets up the gap
Only the famous references	The nearest competitors, named precisely
Silent on concurrent work	Concurrent preprints acknowledged fairly

Handle concurrent preprints fairly

• If a closely related preprint appeared shortly before or during your cycle, acknowledge it and state what is independent or different about your work — since ARR has no anonymity period, reviewers may well know both.
• Do not claim novelty a reviewer can disprove with a two-week-old arXiv paper; scope the claim instead.

Freshness sweep

Before submitting, sweep for missed neighbours:
  - recent ACL / EMNLP / NAACL / AACL / EACL proceedings in the Anthology
  - Findings volumes (often missed)
  - LREC-COLING for resources / multilingual / lower-resource work
  - TACL and Computational Linguistics for journal-track results
  - arXiv for the last ~3 months of concurrent preprints

Mind the European and multilingual neighbourhood

• EACL's community overlaps heavily with LREC-COLING (resources, multilingual, lower-resource languages) and EAMT (machine translation). A related-work section on a multilingual or resource paper that ignores these venues will read as under-read to EACL reviewers.
• Cite work on the specific languages you study, including regional and non-English-language publications where relevant.

Avoid sibling-venue misattribution

• The Anthology hosts every *ACL venue; confirm each citation's venue line before labeling it "EACL." See the sibling-confusion guard in ../../resources/exemplars/library.md.

Output format

[Positioning] Contrastive / Listy
[Nearest competitors] <named, with the contrast to each>
[Attribution errors] <Findings-as-main, wrong venue, preprint-over-Anthology>
[Freshness gaps] <recent *ACL / LREC-COLING / preprints missed>
[Multilingual neighbourhood] <European/resource venues to add>
[Fix order] <what to revise>