acl-topic-selection

acl-topic-selection is a skill for Claude Code from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. It costs 73 tokens per session (1,390 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for choosing a suitable research venue and paper format for natural language processing and computational linguistics work. ACL is a major conference in this field, while the other named venues include related conferences and journals.

In plain words
What is it for?
Classifying the contribution, choosing among ACL-family venues and related journals, deciding between long and short papers, and sharpening the computational-linguistics framing.
Why use it?
It helps researchers make the paper's language-focused contribution clear and avoid choosing a venue or paper length that does not fit the work.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the ACL-Skills plugin — 12 skills shipped together

Good fit Classifying the contribution, choosing among ACL-family venues and related journals, deciding between long and short papers, and sharpening the computational-linguistics framing.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/acl-topic-selection
About the project

Awesome Journal Skills is a collection of agent skill packs tailored to hundreds of academic journals across fields including economics, social science, medicine, science, and engineering. Researchers use the packs for tasks such as choosing topics, designing empirical strategies, preparing tables and figures, submitting papers, and responding to reviewers. The catalogue entries are the project's journal-specific skills and related plugins.

brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills · 1,090 stars · on GitHub · copaper.ai

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill acl-topic-selection
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ACL-Skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for acl-topic-selection

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/acl-topic-selection/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/acl-topic-selection)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/acl-topic-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/acl-topic-selection/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for acl-topic-selection

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/acl-topic-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/acl-topic-selection.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,390 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00073 $0.01390
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00695
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00278
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00139

Measured 11d ago against content hash c1d2ebadffb1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

acl-topic-selection scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

ACL-Skills/skills/acl-topic-selection/SKILL.md · 122 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 122 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ACL Topic Selection

Use this before the first draft. ACL is the flagship of the *ACL family: broadest scope across computational linguistics and NLP, the most competitive main-program bar, and — under ACL Rolling Review — a venue choice you finalize at commitment time, which gives topic strategy an unusual second chance.

What ACL rewards

  • A contribution about language: modeling it, measuring it, resourcing it, or explaining how systems process it — with the linguistic question visible, not incidental.
  • Typed contributions reviewers can classify fast: method, resource, evaluation/metric, analysis, theory, or position. Papers that are half method and half unvalidated resource read as neither.
  • Evidence proportional to breadth (see acl-experiments) and an error analysis that says something about language, not just scores.
  • Work engaging the current field conversation — for ACL 2026, the special theme was explainability of NLP models, with a dedicated Thematic Paper Award; each edition names its own theme.

Family routing

Signal Better home
Core NLP contribution, broad audience, strongest possible reviews wanted ACL (or whichever *ACL your ARR package is eligible to commit to)
Empirical, engineering-forward NLP; dense experimental papers EMNLP — historically the empirical sibling, same ARR pipeline
Regional relevance, or timing fits its cycle windows NAACL / EACL / AACL
Needs >9 pages, revision-based journal reviewing, no conference clock TACL (journal, also Anthology-published)
Survey-scale or theoretical linguistics depth Computational Linguistics (journal)
LLM-centric work thin on language questions COLM or an ML venue (NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR)
Deployed-system lessons, product constraints ACL industry track — separate CFP and deadlines
Early-stage, student-led ACL Student Research Workshop

Because commitment is decoupled, "ACL vs EMNLP" is often not a submission-time decision: submit to ARR when ready, then commit to the conference whose window and bar the finished package fits.

Read the full file on GitHub · 122 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 122 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A c1d2ebadffb1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

acl-topic-selection is a skill published in the GitHub repository brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills (1,090 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 1,390 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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