ACL 2026 Wraps Up in San Diego
The 2026 edition of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) has come to a close, this year hosted in San Diego, USA. Once again, the conference brought together researchers, engineers, and practitioners from across the NLP community to discuss the latest advances in language technology, and this edition, too, saw the participation of Prof. Roberto Navigli, the Sapienza NLP group, and Babelscape.
Among the works presented was the paper “Process Reward Models Meet Planning: Generating Precise and Scalable Datasets for Step-Level Rewards”, by Raffaele Pisano and Roberto Navigli, accepted at ACL 2026. The paper introduces a method for generating reliable planning problems, comprising around one million reasoning steps across multiple domains, providing strong supervision for Process Reward Models and leading to improvements on both mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks.
Prof. Roberto Navigli was also actively involved in the conference’s industry track, where he took part in two events. He delivered the keynote, “Bridging Academic and Industrial AI: Lessons from BabelNet and ChatMinerva”, sharing insights drawn from these two projects on how research can translate into real-world, industry-facing applications. He also joined the “Careers in NLP” panel, together with Iz Beltagy, Heng Ji, and Trung Bui, moderated by Yang Liu, discussing career paths and opportunities within the field of Natural Language Processing.
As always, ACL confirmed itself as an important opportunity for exchange and discussion within the international NLP community, and we look forward to future occasions to continue this work together.