A paper by Bo Pang (Cornell CS PhD 2006), Lillian Lee and Shivakumar Vaithyanathan (IBM) is one of the nominees for the inaugural Test-of-Time Paper on Computational Linguistics, spanning all publications between 2002-2012 at five main ACL conferences, two journals and all workshops.
"Thumbs up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques" (2002) is cited because "The insights and challenges discussed in this work have provided the basis of many works and is still driving new research today. According to recent statistics it is the highest cited EMNLP paper. With over 6800 Google scholar citations, and over 400 Google scholar citations in 2017 alone, this work has stood the test of time."
All 20 nominees listed are here and the 1-3 winners will be determined later.