Write each sentence in a separate line which makes it easier to comment out selective sentences. For instance, write as follows:

This is the first sentence.
This is the second sentence.

instead of writing as follows:

This is the first sentence. This is the second sentence.

which allows the following to comment out the second sentence:

This is the first sentence.
% This is the second sentence.

Put \noindent on any paragraph that

• Starts at the top of the page,

• Follows tables, figures, or algorithm boxes.

Most reputable journals and conference proceedings recommend LaTex for scientific writing. This chapter helps you keep consistent formatting in your writings, which has the following benefits:

• Readers can easily follow your content since they do not need to learn a new formatting style.

• You will spend less time writing since you already know what formatting you want to use to present the content.

• Your writings will look professional since the guidelines suggested here have been used to publish numerous papers.

Contents

• Getting Started

• File Structure

• Packages

• References

• Paragraphs

• Labels

• Tables

• Figures

• Lists

Top Level

Our template includes 4 files on the top level:

• acl_latex.tex: contains the main content.

• acl_natbib.bst: defines the bibliography format.

• acl.sty: defines the paper format.

• custom.bib: contains all references.

Tex Folder

Except for acl_latex.tex, all the other tex files are saved under the tex folder, making it easier to manage extended contents. There are 9 files under the tex folder:

• abstract.tex

• introduction.tex

• related-work.tex

• approach.tex

• experiments.tex

• analysis.tex

• conclusion.tex

• acknowledgements.tex

• appndeix.tex

These files should be added in acl_latex.tex:

\input{tex/abstract}
\input{tex/introduction}
\input{tex/related-work}
\input{tex/approach}
\input{tex/experiments}
\input{tex/analysis}
\input{tex/conclusion}
\input{tex/acknowledgments}

% References come after the acknowledgment section
\bibliography{custom}

% Appendix comes after the references and must start at a new page
\cleardoublepage\appendix
\input{tex/appendix}

Image Folder

Additionally, the img folder contains all image files included as figures in the paper.

Installation

Follow the instructions provided by the LaTex team.

Editors

The following editors are recommended to write in LaTex:

• Overleaf: an online editor that is widely used in collaborative writing.

• TeXstudio: an offline editor that supports Windows, Mac OS, and most Linux distributions.

Template

Throughout the guidelines, this template is used to show examples, which is the official template for ACL conferences.

Bibliography Style

Our template uses acl_natbib.bst to format the bibliography, indicated in acl.sty:

\bibliographystyle{acl_natbib}

Bib Entries

Our template uses custom.bib, is indicated at the bottom of acl_latex.tex, for adding references to be included in the paper:

\bibliography{custom}

Any preprint must be checked whether or not it has been published to a peer-reviewed venue. If it has, use the reference from the peer-reviewed venue instead of the preprint source such as arXiv.

Keep the following conventions to add entries in the bib file:

- For key, make sure there is no duplicate.

- For title, surround the text with curly braces; otherwise, the title will be lowercased in print:

@inproceedings{marcus-etal-1993-building,
    Title = {{Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank}},

@inproceedings{marcus-etal-1993-building,
    Title = "{Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank}",

- For booktitle or journal, do not use acronyms but the full venue names. For instance, the following is good:

Booktitle = {Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics},

whereas the following is bad:

Booktitle = {Proceedings of ACL},

Also, do not append the acronym in parentheses at the end of the venue name. For instance, remove (ACL) from the following::

Booktitle = {Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)},

Use the series field rather to indicate the acronym.

- For series, use the format acronym'year (e.g., ACL'20), where acronym is the acronym of the venue and year is the last two digits of the published year.

- For pages, put two dashes between the first and the last pages (e.g., 1--10).

- For url, add the link to the original source of the paper (e.g., ACL Anthology).

Citations

Use \citet when the reference is used in context:

\citet{devlin-etal-2019-bert} introduced BERT.
BERT was introduced by \cite{devlin-etal-2019-bert}.

Use \cite when the reference is used outside of the context:

BERT is a transformer-based contextualized embedding model \cite{devlin-etal-2019-bert}.

Use \citealt when the reference is used inside of parentheses:

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT; \citealt{devlin-etal-2019-bert}) is used to generate token embeddings.

Required Packages

Our template uses acl.sty to format the paper, indicated at the top of acl_latex.tex:

\usepackage[final]{acl}

If you replace final to review, it turns into the anonymous mode.

The standard packages include the followings:

\usepackage{times}
\usepackage{latexsym}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Fonts

The following packages add useful fonts:

\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}       % enable \mathbb, \mathcal
\usepackage{bold-extra}    % enable \texttt{\textbf{}}
\usepackage{bm}            % enable bold font in math mode
\renewcommand{\UrlFont}{\ttfamily\small}  % define fonts for URLs

Recommended Packages

The following packages are recommended:

\usepackage{graphicx}      % import graphical images
\usepackage{multirow}      % merge rows in tables
\usepackage{booktabs}      % borders in tabular
\usepackage{enumitem}      % list margins
\usepackage{subcaption}    % create sub-tables and sub-figures
\usepackage[hang,flushmargin]{footmisc}  % minimize footnote indentation
\newcommand{\LN}{\linebreak\noindent}    % manage inline spacing

Left Margin

Use the following command if you do not want any indent in a list environment:

\begin{itemize}[leftmargin=*]
\item A
\item B
\end{itemize}

If you want to set this globally, uncomment the following configurations in acl_latex.tex:

\setenumerate[1]{leftmargin=*}    % no enumerate indentation
\setitemize[1]{leftmargin=*}      % no itemize indentation

Vertical Spacing

Use the following command to control the vertical spacing in a list environment:

\begin{itemize}
\setlength\itemsep{0em}
\item A
\item B
\end{itemize}

Labels must not include any space. Use the following prefixes to name labels:

• Section: sec:

• Subsection: ssec:

• Subsubsection: sssec:

• Tables (including sub-tables): tab:

• Figures (including sub-figures): fig:

• Algorithms: alg:

Here are a few examples:

• The label of the introduction section → sec:introduction

• The label of a subsection describing a decoding strategy → ssec:decoding-strategy

• The label of the table showing data statistics → tab:data-stats

Tables in Column

Use the following template to include tables in the column:

Use the following options for all tables:

If the table exceeds the column width, put the tabular inside a \resizebox instead:

Make sure values in the header row are always center-aligned regardless of the configuration. You can specify this by using \multicolumn:

Make sure the label starts with the prefix tab:.

Tables in Page

Use the following template to include tables that expand to the full page.

• If the table exceeds the page width, use \textwidth instead of \columnwidth for \resizebox.

Sub-Tables

Use the following template to create sub-tables.

• The subtable environment requires the subcaption package.

• Put \vspace{0.5em} at the end of every sub-table except for the very last one.

Image Format

Before including figures, make sure the followings:

• Export all images to PDF format. Converting image files (e.g., PNG) to PDF does not render well; you must export the vectorized images to PDF.

• Crop white margins around the image. If you use Mac OS or Linux, you can simply type the following command in a terminal, which will crop image.pdf and save it to image-crop.pdf:

Figures in Column

Use the following template to include figures in column:

Use the following options for all figures:

The width can be configured proportionally. The following example sets the width to 0.9 * \columnwidth:

If the figure seems too large, use scale instead of width as the option for \includegraphics:

Make sure the label starts with the prefix fig:.

Figures in Page

Use the following template to include tables that expand to the full page.

• Use the \textwidth option instead of \columnwidth for \resizebox.

Sub-Figures

Use the following template to create sub-figures.

• The subfigure environment requires the subcaption package.

• Put \vspace{0.5em} at the end of every sub-figure except for the very last one.