Conference Manager¶
As of: 2026-10-02 · Version 2
The Conference Manager keeps track, for your research group, of which conferences you follow, when their deadlines are and which of your own papers were submitted or published where. A timeline shows every date at a glance, including past ones. When a conference has not announced its dates yet, LLARS records an estimated time window, and at the push of a button an AI refresh searches the web for new dates and reconciles them with what LLARS already knows.
Open the Conference Manager from the home tile "Conference Manager"
(/conferences). Reading requires the permission
feature:conference_manager:view; creating, editing and starting the AI
refresh require feature:conference_manager:edit. The roles researcher and
admin have both.
Groups, series and editions¶
Everything in the Conference Manager belongs to a research group. If you are in exactly one group, LLARS opens it directly. If you are in several, you pick one. If you are in none, you can request access on the same page; once the request is approved, you see the group. Other groups cannot see your conferences and papers. Within a group you are owner, member or viewer; a viewer can only read.
| Term | Example | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Series (conference series) | ACL, EMNLP, ARR | Name, acronym, CORE ranking, website — shared by all years |
| Edition | EMNLP 2027 | One year of the series with submission deadline, author notification, conference period, location and website |
| Paper | Your contribution | Title, status, authors, submissions, links to arXiv and DOI |
A group has five tabs: Conferences (list), Papers, Calendar, Timeline and Kanban Board (papers by status).
Reading the timeline¶
The Timeline tab shows each edition as one row. From left to right it carries the edition's three milestones, joined by a thin band:
| Mark | Looks like | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Submission deadline | Document icon, salmon red | The paper must be submitted by this day. |
| Author notification | Bell, light blue | The day the conference tells authors whether their paper was accepted. |
| Conference period | Green bar | First to last day of the meeting. |
| Estimated time window | Pale rectangle with a dashed border, in the milestone's colour | The date has not been published yet and probably falls within this window. |
| Today | Thin vertical line with the date | Today's date. |
What “author notification” means
It is the conference's decision on submitted papers (accepted or rejected) — not a reminder sent by LLARS. That is why every tooltip names the edition's acronym and year, for example "Author notification · ACL 2027".
Hover: When you move the mouse over a mark, the band of that edition turns teal, its marks lift slightly and the row gets a light background. You immediately see which deadline, which notification and which period belong together. The tooltip names the milestone with the conference name, the date, the location as a Google Maps link, the CORE ranking as a link to the CORE portal and the edition's website.
Saving space: If two editions do not overlap in time, the timeline puts them on the same row. The band is then interrupted between them, and the hover highlights only the edition you are pointing at. Each edition starts with a small label showing acronym and year, plus pills for the CORE ranking and "estimated". On a phone the label sits above the row.
Controls:
- Scrolling works in both directions. The axis runs from one month before the earliest to one month after the latest date, so past editions are within reach. The month header stays on top while you scroll; year boundaries are drawn as a stronger line.
- Zoom with the pills 3 / 6 / 12 months. Zoom changes only the scale; the axis still spans all dates.
- Today jumps to today's date and centres it, also after data reloads.
- ‹ and › scroll one month back or forward.
- The legend above the timeline shows every mark, including the estimated time window.
The Calendar tab shows the same dates as a month calendar. Estimated time windows appear there as pale background areas.
Confirmed dates and estimated time windows¶
Each of an edition's three milestones is in one of three states:
| State | When | Shown as |
|---|---|---|
| confirmed | An exact date is recorded, for example from the call for papers. | Mark or bar |
| estimated | There is only a window "from … to …". | Transparent rectangle with a dashed border; the edition carries the pill "estimated" |
| unknown | Neither a date nor a window. | Nothing |
Where the estimate comes from: Many conferences publish their dates only a few months before the deadline. Previous years still show roughly when they will be — for example "submission always in mid-May". That is why an estimate is always a range, never a single day. Every estimated edition has a basis (for example "derived from 2023–2026: submission always between 10 and 25 May") and a confidence (low, medium or high). Both appear in the window's tooltip, such as "estimated: 10.05.–24.05., basis: …". In the list the window appears as text, for example "approx. 30.10.–14.11.2027".
The exact date replaces the window. As soon as an exact date is recorded — by you or by the AI refresh with a source — the milestone counts as confirmed, and the timeline shows the mark instead of the rectangle. The window is kept as the derivation. The "estimated" pill disappears once no milestone of the edition is estimated any more.
Entering it yourself: In a conference's form, every milestone has a toggle "confirmed / estimated (time window)". For "estimated" you enter two dates, from and to; the end must not be before the start. Below, you record the basis of the estimate and the confidence.
AI refresh¶
The AI refresh goes through your editions one after another, searches the web for new or changed dates and records what it can back up with a source.
Starting it: In the Conferences tab, the button "Refresh (AI)" starts a run for the whole group — for every edition with a date from three months ago onwards and for every edition without any date. The row action "Refresh this conference" checks only that one edition.
Only on click
The AI refresh never runs automatically or on a schedule — only when someone starts it. At most one run per group is active at a time; a second start is rejected while the first is running.
What it does for each edition:
- Search — a web search for the edition's call for papers and important dates.
- Read — up to three pages: search results, the edition's website and the
series' website. For the ARR series it always reads the ACL Rolling
Review dates page (
aclrollingreview.org/dates). - Reconcile — a language model receives the page text and the values LLARS already has, and returns for each field a value, a rating (confirmed, estimated or unknown), the source and a short quote as evidence.
- Record — according to fixed rules:
| AI rating | What LLARS does |
|---|---|
| confirmed, with source and evidence | Records the exact date or overwrites it. |
| estimated | Only fills a still empty window. Confirmed dates and hand-entered windows stay untouched. |
| unknown | Changes nothing. |
The AI never deletes a value. If it finds nothing, everything stays as it was. Only a page LLARS actually read in this run counts as a source, and the evidence must appear verbatim on that page — for dates including day and month. Anything that fails this check is discarded and counted as rejected in the progress window, so a foreign web page cannot plant dates on the model.
Live progress: A progress panel lists every edition of the run with its state — queued, searching, reading page (with the website's name), analysing, n changes, unchanged or error. Above it you see the current step as a sentence, for example "Searching for 'EMNLP 2027 call for papers'…", and a progress bar. While a run is active, the pill "AI working" pulses in the Conference Manager header. You can close the panel or reload the page; the run continues on the server, and LLARS shows its current state when you come back. A run over many editions takes a few minutes, because LLARS deliberately pauses between searches.
Cancelling: The "Cancel" button ends the run after the edition it is currently working on. Whatever was recorded until then stays.
Resuming: If a run was cancelled or failed (for example because the server restarted meanwhile), the progress window offers "Resume". LLARS then starts a new run with only the editions that were not finished yet; the results of the old run are kept.
Reviewing the changes: At the end there is a summary, and for each edition a list expands: field · old → new · rating · source · evidence. The source links to the page the value came from, the evidence is a quote from there. Afterwards the conference list shows for each edition when it was last refreshed; the tooltip summarises the result. If an edition fails, the error is shown with it, and the run continues with the next one.
Check the sources
The AI only records what it can back up with a source. Conferences still move deadlines now and then, or list several deadlines (such as abstract and full paper). A look at source and evidence is worth it before any important submission.
ARR cycles: ACL Rolling Review runs several submission cycles per year. When refreshing the ARR series, the AI recognises these cycles and creates missing cycles as new editions — but only if their submission deadline is confirmed.
Reading example: ARR cycle and ACL¶
To submit to ACL, you first submit to a cycle of ACL Rolling Review (ARR) and receive the reviews there. Afterwards you commit the reviewed paper to ACL by a deadline. On the timeline, this shows as two editions. The sketch shows only the shape, not real dates; the valid dates are on the ARR and ACL websites.
Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug
ARR-Feb 2027 D━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━B
ACL 2027 D━━━━━━━━━━B━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━[██████]
D = submission deadline · B = author notification (bell) · [███] = conference period · ━ = connecting band
How to read the two rows:
- ARR-Feb 2027: The document icon is the submission deadline of the February cycle. The band leads to the bell, the author notification: on that day ARR releases reviews and meta-review. An ARR cycle is not a meeting, so its row usually has no bar.
- ACL 2027: The document icon is the deadline ACL itself announces — for ARR conferences usually the deadline by which you commit a reviewed paper to ACL. The bell is ACL's acceptance decision, the green bar the meeting itself.
The three marks of a row always belong to the same edition; the hover shows it. If a milestone is missing, the band joins the ones that exist. If ACL 2027 still carries the "estimated" pill, you see a pale rectangle instead of a mark — as soon as ACL publishes the date and someone records it (or the AI refresh finds it), it becomes a mark. Because the two editions barely touch in time here, the timeline may also place them on one row; a gap in the band then separates them.
CORE ranking and location¶
- CORE pill: The CORE ranking (A*, A, B, C, Unranked) appears as a pill in the list, on the cards and in the tooltip. A click opens the CORE portal in a new tab, searching for the conference's acronym.
- Location: City and country are a link. A click opens the place in Google Maps, also in a new tab.
Linking papers¶
Every paper can carry an arXiv link and a DOI, so everyone finds the preprint and the official version with one click. Add both as soon as a paper is published.
| Field | You can enter | LLARS stores |
|---|---|---|
| arXiv | 2501.00001, arXiv:2501.00001 or the full URL |
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00001 |
| DOI | 10.1234/abcd, doi:10.1234/abcd or https://doi.org/10.1234/abcd |
10.1234/abcd, linked to https://doi.org/10.1234/abcd |
In the paper list and on the Kanban Board cards the links appear as icons of their own: arXiv as a preprint sheet with a distinctive "x", DOI as two linked rings with a small document. The tooltip reads "Open on arXiv" or "Open DOI page". A paper's conference chip leads to the conference list, filtered to that conference.
Controlling it via the API¶
Everything the interface can do also works through the v1 API under
/api/v1/conference-manager/*: reading groups, creating and changing series,
editions and papers, setting time windows, and starting, following and
cancelling the AI refresh. Create a personal API key under Settings → API
Keys and give it the scopes:
| Scope | Allows |
|---|---|
conference:read |
Read calls (GET) |
conference:write |
Creating, changing, deleting, and starting or cancelling the AI refresh |
The API checks the group on every call: a group you are not a member of answers with 404.
KEY=<your API key>
BASE=https://llars.e-beratungsinstitut.de # or your own LLARS instance
# All editions of group 1 in 2027
curl -s "$BASE/api/v1/conference-manager/conferences?group_id=1&year=2027" \
-H "X-API-Key: $KEY"
All endpoints, fields and examples are in the v1 Conference API.