The Hallway Track: an ACL 2026 Retrospective

Alongside the formal program of academic conferences runs the Hallway Track, an informal venue for scholarly exchange occurring between the official talks, usually in the hallways of conference venues. It appears on no schedule and has no chair. Its program is the question you were too afraid to ask in session or the introduction made by a mutual friend. Strand a few thousand scholars in a foreign city, arrange for them to keep bumping into each other, and the hallway track is what you get.

The hallway track is often said to be the most productive part of a conference, because it is built from the most essential material of nerds talking to nerds. People working in hyper-specific niches find each other, and better yet, those niche-specialists discover that their problems or methods can be recombined into something neither of them had anticipated.

Anna in a yellow top and her friend Marc at a brunch table laid with avocado toast, eggs, and coffee. — First order of business: brunch.

Selfie of Anna, Marc, and Edith smiling in front of the ACL 2026 San Diego banner at the venue entrance. — At the time of this picture we were not yet sleep deprived.

To participate, one must first master the essential conference lingo: Where are you from? What do you work on? Do you like [conference city]? Have you done [tourist activity everyone is supposed to do]? Interesting [current weather] we have here. Tell me, how does it differ from your home city? These topics are great to know as they can defuse awkward silences, but their real utility is as a segue into the real subject of your current projects and why they matter. Then, if you are truly lucky, you may also talk your way into a potential solution, a collaboration, or a professional opportunity.

The secret is that the hallway actually extends far out into the surrounding conference city, and therefore strange and wonderful places if you let it. The trick is saying yes to adventure and see you later to your comfort zone as much as possible, whether that means abandoning your plans or losing out on sleep. The best conversations rarely happen where you think they will. What follows is an account of my hallway adventures at ACL 2026 in San Diego, California.

Let’s set the scene. I came to ACL with my two best friends and classmates, Marc and Edith. None of us were presenting anything, but we decided to come to get the lay of the land in CL/NLP and do a bit of networking. This is a particularly salient summer for us as we are hunting for opportunities in anticipation of our graduation in the spring. In particular, I was on the hunt for a potential PhD advisor. So much so that I had Claude make me an advisor scouting sheet for my schedule printout.

Anna's printed ACL 2026 schedule for Monday, marked up with highlighter and handwritten notes. — My personalized itinerary.

A printed 'PhD advisor lookout — people to find' scouting sheet, with the names and notes below the heading blurred out and a caption reading 'I did not actually get to talk to these people, lol.' — A very normal amount of preparation.

And we were so green. At a grad student’s first major conference, you don’t yet know which combination of words will make your work intelligible to someone else, so you try on different elevator pitches and see what works.

A few I tried were:

“Hi, I’m Anna.I work on interpretability.” and I work on representation analysis.” and I work on geometric and topological approaches to LLM interpretability.” Have you ever heard of topological data analysis?” (Reader, they have not)

But the power of a conference is the long stream of opportunities to try again, to rephrase and refine your answer to “What do you work on?” And before you know it, suddenly you wear the hat of an area specialist, and are being introduced to others as mech interp person or optimization person. There is nothing quite like the impromptu introduction that makes you step outside yourself a bit and say “Hey, maybe I am!” Watching yourself become you in real time is a gift that few experiences give quite as regularly as the hallway track.

It’s also true that sometimes guest introductions can be incorrect or reductive. Part of the challenge is either becoming very good at correcting others on this or becoming comfortable with a bit of flexibility in your scholarly identity. It’s almost as if each new encounter presents an optimization problem. You wish to nerd-snipe your interlocutor to the maximum amount, but your constraints are shared background and patience.

Our hallway truly opened after the reception for the main conference on the 4th of July. Afterwards, fresh off an open bar, we collective-consciousness-ed our way up to the 40th floor to get a good vantage point for the fireworks, growing our party along the way. The rooftop bar was completely full, so we went all the way back down to the boardwalk, half-dreaming, laughing, practicing our conference lingo. It was easy, like kindergarten, to make friends: “Hey! You like NLP too! Want to come with us?”

So we watched the fireworks over San Diego Bay.

A rooftop selfie of Anna and four new friends at the top of the Hyatt after the conference reception. — Instant friends at the top of the Hyatt.

A crowd on the boardwalk silhouetted against fireworks over the bay. — A truly cinematic moment.

Edith and Anna in the foreground of a crowd watching fireworks burst over San Diego Bay beside a glowing lamppost. — Edith and I admiring the show.

Fireworks bursting over San Diego Bay as someone films on their phone. — Boom!

We visited Top Gun sites of importance and met some imposters.

Four friends in green flight suits striking the Top Gun finger-gun pose in front of a fighter jet numbered 205. — You mean this wasn't *actually* Tom Cruise?

Anna giving a thumbs up inside Kansas City BBQ, surrounded by neon beer signs and memorabilia. — Kansas City BBQ, where the *Great Balls of Fire* piano scene was filmed.

Anna at a red-checkered table with Top Gun projected on the wall beneath a sign reading 'up here we're the best of the best.' — I took this one for my mom, who loves Top Gun.

We went on a big ship and sat in some aircraft!

Two friends buckled into aircraft ejection seats aboard the USS Midway. — “Can I get a ginger ale and a little bag of pretzels, please?”

Five friends squeezed onto the bench seats inside the cabin of a tactical helicopter aboard the USS Midway, round porthole windows behind them. — The only open seats we could find on the USS Midway were inside this tactical helicopter.

In search of our wild side, we went to the zoo.

Four friends squeezed into a Skyfari aerial gondola at the San Diego Zoo, the California Tower in the distance. — The San Diego Zoo, by gondola and on foot.

A group selfie aboard the zoo's yellow guided-tour tram. — Gondolas, buses, and things that go at the San Diego Zoo.

The group posing beneath a giant polar bear statue at the zoo's Arctic exhibit. — The only polar bear we encountered.

A friend with an orange backpack standing among lush green zoo foliage. — Orange backpack + orange bird = instant family?

Two friends perched on a bronze animal statue at the zoo. — Ribbit.

I commissioned a poem in Balboa Park.

A street poet at a small table under a stone archway in Balboa Park, composing a poem on a typewriter. — Riffing on the nature of consciousness and creativity.

A pale-blue A-frame chalkboard sign reading 'Poeticize your life — share a topic on your mind, get a poem. Suggested donation $10 to 20, or like a fully funded art grant.' — A small price to pay for original art.

Aspiring to great heights, we climbed a tree.

Gonzalo reclining in the sprawling, sun-dappled canopy of an enormous Moreton Bay fig tree. — Gonzalo in a tree.

Anna standing in the crook of the huge fig tree's trunk, throwing peace signs. — Me in a tree.

Had lots of street tacos!

Two adobado street tacos piled with meat, cilantro, and salsa on a red cafeteria tray. — These adobado tacos brought me back to life after my flight.

Anna and friends around a table full of tacos mid-conference. — Mid-conference adobado.

The Brandeis folks met up again and again.

The full Brandeis cohort — about a dozen students and faculty — posing together under the ACL 2026 San Diego banner at the venue entrance. — A group Brandeis picture thanks to Yangyang!

A group of Brandeis attendees kneeling and standing in front of a poster board at the conference. — A Brandeis SemEval poster!

My hallway also included a full day of volunteer shifts. I got very lucky and was posted in the Interpretability orals section for the first half of the day. It was the last day, and everyone was familiar with the map and the logistics by now. So I simply stood sentinel over the interp talks and learned a bit more about latent representations…

A conference slide titled 'What is the proper unit of interpretability?' projected in the interpretability orals session. — “What is the proper unit of interpretability?”

Anna in a red volunteer shirt standing by the entrance to the Harbor orals room. — Orals room monitor at your service!

What makes this the hallway and not just a playground is that in all of these ridiculous, random experiences with strangers, we were talking shop. Ablations on the boardwalk after fireworks. The nature of consciousness at the poem stand. Reducing inference time latency over Top Gun BBQ. Latent tokenization at the rooftop mixer. Algebraic topology on a tipsy walk home from the USS Midway. Sometimes the conversations got a little esoteric or metaphysical (studying language models will do that to you) but they generally led back to the work or ended in swapping LinkedIn connections.

The wonderful absurdity about the clash of academia and tourism that happens at conference, is that the rush of experience makes your area of scholarship feel fated. Your badge makes you feel important. Dropping jargon gives you a sense of belonging. The people you meet make you want to meet more people. All of this comes together to foster growth and a great sense of inspiration to experience more of the world.

At the risk of waxing poetic, what is at the end of the hallway is… you. You the student, you the scholar, you the person under the lanyard discovering your place in the world. Thank you, friends of ACL 2026, for walking there alongside me, and for making me laugh the whole way down.