Skip to main content

18. Conclusion

The conclusion is short. Many great *ACL papers have a conclusion of three to five sentences.

Not the abstract, not the introduction. All three compress the paper, and copying text between them is a tell reviewers catch at once. The abstract sells the work to someone deciding whether to read it; the introduction promises what the paper will show; the conclusion reports, to a reader who has now finished, what it showed and what follows. Tense is the giveaway — the introduction looks forward ("we propose"), the conclusion looks back ("we showed"). Genuine caveats go in Limitations, not here.

What goes in​

  • One sentence restating what you did.
  • One or two sentences restating what you found, with the headline number.
  • One sentence on implications or future work — if any.

That is it.

What does NOT go in​

  • New results. (If it is in the conclusion, it should be in the results section.)
  • A full restating of the abstract. (Different role, different audience.)
  • Speculation about what your method might one day do. (Restraint earns trust.)
  • A wishlist of unfinished follow-ups. (One sentence on direction is plenty.)

Phrasebook: the moves of a conclusion​

A conclusion has three moves and runs three to five sentences: restate what you did, restate what you found, end on what it means. As in the other phrasebooks, most entries below are adaptable templates with [bracketed] slots; a few are real, verified sentences from well-judged conclusions and carry a citation. Two entries sit in the open under each move; expand Show more for the rest. Brevity is the whole point — if your conclusion needs all of these, it is too long.

Restating what you did (from real papers and templates)​

The opening move: one sentence, past tense, naming the contribution and its defining property.

  • "In this work, we presented the Transformer, the first sequence transduction model based entirely on attention, replacing the recurrent layers most commonly used in encoder-decoder architectures with multi-headed self-attention." — One sentence, past tense: the thing, its defining property, and what it replaces. Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al., 2017)
  • "In this paper we presented [method], a [one-phrase description] for [task]." — The bare restate-what-you-did opener; keep it to one clause.
Show 3 more
  • "In this work we presented a hybrid pointer-generator architecture with coverage, and showed that it reduces inaccuracies and repetition." — Folds what-we-did and what-we-found into a single, modest sentence. Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks (See et al., ACL 2017)
  • "We introduced [resource / method] and used it to [the thing it enabled]." — Links the contribution to what it made possible, in one breath.
  • "This paper asked [the question] and answered it by [the approach]." — Frames the conclusion around the question the introduction opened.

Restating what you found, with the number (templates)​

The conclusion earns its place by carrying the headline number, not a vague "it worked."

  • "On [benchmark], [method] reaches [score], improving over [baseline] by [delta]." — The headline number, restated once; the conclusion is not the place to first introduce it.
  • "We found that [the central finding], a result that held across [the settings tested]." — States the finding and its scope together, so the summary does not overreach.
Show 3 more
  • "The gains are [modest / substantial] ([delta]) and, more importantly, [the qualitative takeaway]." — Pairs the number with what it means, which is the conclusion's real job.
  • "Our [analysis / ablation] showed that [component] is what drives the result." — Carries the analysis's main finding into the summary.
  • "Where [method] helped most was [setting]; where it did not, [setting], we leave open." — An honest two-sided summary of the result.

The implication, and one line of future work (from real papers and templates)​

A conclusion without an "and therefore" is a summary. End on what the work means — then, at most, one sentence of where it points.

  • "Our major contribution is further generalizing these findings to deep bidirectional architectures, allowing the same pre-trained model to successfully tackle a broad set of NLP tasks." — States why the contribution matters beyond the numbers, without overclaiming. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (Devlin et al., NAACL 2019)
  • "These results suggest [the broader implication]; we therefore expect [the consequence for the field or for practice]." — The "and therefore" that turns a summary into a conclusion.
Show 4 more
  • "Our model exhibits many abstractive abilities, but attaining higher levels of abstraction remains an open research question." — One sentence of future work, framed as an open question rather than a to-do list. Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks (See et al., ACL 2017)
  • "A natural next step is [one direction], which we leave to future work." — The single, disciplined future-work sentence — one direction, not a wishlist.
  • "We release [dataset / method] at [URL] to support [the follow-on work it enables]." — Ends on the resource and what it unlocks, a concrete implication.
  • "More broadly, [the finding] bears on [the larger question] the field has been asking." — Connects the narrow result to the conversation the introduction joined.

Common mistakes​

  • The padding conclusion. Three paragraphs that re-summarize the paper. Reviewers skip these. Be brief.
  • Conclusion = future work. If 80% of the conclusion is what you have not done, the contribution feels thin.
  • Missing implication. A conclusion with no "and therefore…" is a summary, not a conclusion.

Five examples of well-judged conclusions​

  1. Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al., 2017). Five sentences. State of the art, simpler, faster, future directions for one sentence. Done.
  2. BERT (Devlin et al., NAACL 2019). Restates the main empirical finding and points at the broader takeaway.
  3. GloVe (Pennington et al., EMNLP 2014). A short conclusion that earns its claim of "best of both worlds."
  4. With Little Power Comes Great Responsibility (Card et al., EMNLP 2020). Conclusion makes a normative point — a great example of when a conclusion gets to say something the rest of the paper has built toward.
  5. Get To The Point (See et al., ACL 2017). Tight, modest, complete.

Further reading​