The Big Picture 2026:
Crafting a Research Narrative v2

Workshop @ ACL 2026

San Diego, July 2–7, 2026

News

October 7th, 2025: Website and CfP for the 2026 Big Picture Workshop are live.

Overview

All research exists within a larger context. Progress is made by standing on the shoulders of giants—building on the foundations laid by earlier researchers. In NLP it has been said that research is "not so much going round in circles as ascending a spiral" (Spark-Jones, 1994) while citation analysis of recent work suggests that research progress looks more like a series of intertwined staircases (Hearst, 2018). In light of rapid publication rates and concise paper formats, it has become increasingly difficult, however, to recognize the larger story to which a paper is connected.

The Big Picture Workshop provides a dedicated venue for exploring and distilling broader NLP research narratives. We invite researchers to reflect on how their individual contributions fit within the overall research landscape and what stories they are telling with their bodies of research. The goals of the workshop are:

Enhance the communication and understanding between different lines of work;
Highlight how works connect and build on each other;
Generate insights that are difficult to glean without combining and reconciling different research narratives;
Encourage broader collaboration and awareness of prior work in the NLP community;
Facilitate understanding of the trajectories and insights within the field of NLP, particularly for newcomers and outsiders to the field, in ways that individual research papers typically do not.