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ACL Rolling Review (ARR) invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. The purpose of ARR is to improve efficiency and turnaround of ACL reviewing while keeping the diversity (topical, geographic and otherwise) and editorial freedom that we value about our current organization of the reviewing process at ACL venues. ARR will use Open Review as its platform (but reviews will not be open in ARR). The reviewing and acceptance of papers for publication will be done in two steps:
- Step 1 -- Centralized Rolling Review: Authors submit papers to a unified review pool with deadline on the 15th of each month. Review is handled by an action editor, and revision and resubmission of papers is allowed.
- Step 2 -- Submission to Publication Venue: A publication venue is a conference or workshop that participates in ARR. When an opportunity to submit to a publication venue comes around, authors may submit already reviewed papers with reviews to the publication venue, through the OpenReview website. Program chairs (possibly with the help of senior area chairs) will then accept a subset of submitted papers for presentation.
Relevant topics for ARR include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):
- Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
- Dialogue and Interactive Systems
- Discourse and Pragmatics
- Efficient/low-resource methods in NLP
- Ethics and NLP
- Generation
- Information Extraction
- Information Retrieval and Text Mining
- Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
- Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
- Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
- Machine Learning for NLP
- Machine Translation
- Multilinguality and Language Diversity
- NLP Applications
- Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
- Question Answering
- Resources and Evaluation
- Semantics: Lexical
- Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas
- Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
- Speech and Multimodality
- Summarization
- Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
In addition, ARR welcomes submissions related to special Themes proposed by participating publication venues.
Long papers must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus up to one page for ethical considerations (see below), plus unlimited pages of references. Submissions that exceed the length requirements will be desk rejected.
Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of short papers are:
- A small, focused contribution
- A negative result
- An opinion piece
- An interesting application nugget
- Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus up to one page for ethical considerations (see below), plus unlimited pages of references. Submissions that exceed the length requirements will be desk rejected.
ACL has policies for submission, review and citation designed to protect the integrity of two-way anonymized review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. A paper can only be (re)submitted to ARR if no deanonymized preprint has been posted in the month prior to submission. Also, a paper can only be submitted to a venue if no deanonymized preprint has been posted in the month prior to submission. Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.
So, if you submit to the June deadline and get reviews in July, then on July 21st your paper is no longer under review. If you then post a deanonymized preprint on July 22nd, you can't resubmit to ARR or to a conference in the August round but you can in September.
If authors would like to post a non-anonymous preprint or otherwise deanonymize their submission, they will have to withdraw their submission from ARR, a one step process in OpenReview. Note, however, that if authors withdraw more than 48 hours after the submission deadline, they can't resubmit until the 2nd following ARR round. Withdrawing while the reviewing process has been launched is a waste of time and effort of many people. Once a submission is withdrawn, it is removed from that month's reviewing pool. Authors may then make a new submission (subject to the one month anonymity waiting period) which would potentially go to a new AE and new reviewers.
Submissions that violate this requirement will be desk rejected.
Further info:
- Authors may allow their anonymized submission to be publicly available on OpenReview while it is under ARR review. It will be publicized on Twitter by a bot.
- Authors may not make a non-anonymized version of their paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper, we mean another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length.
- If the authors have posted a non-anonymized version of their paper online before the start of the anonymity period, they may submit an anonymized version to ARR. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and the authors must inform the editors in chief that a non-anonymized version exists.
- Authors may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask authors not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise two-way anonymized reviewing during the anonymity period.
- Note that, while authors are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make two-way anonymized reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage authors to wait. Alternatively, authors may consider submitting your work to the Computational Linguistics journal, which does not require anonymization and has a track for “short” (i.e., conference-length) papers.
Papers must not include authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the authors’ identities, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.
Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers.
Supplementary materials should also be anonymized.
Submissions that violate these requirements will be desk rejected.
The author list for submissions should include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the work presented. Each author listed on a submission to ARR will be notified of submissions and reviews.
Submissions that violate this requirement will be desk rejected.
Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but may be excused for not knowing about all unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted and/or is not widely cited).
In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to a submission, and authors are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.
Submissions that violate these requirements will be desk rejected.
For more information, see the ACL Policies for Submission, Review, and Citation.
ARR precludes multiple submissions. ARR will not consider any paper that is under review in a journal or another conference at the time of submission, and submitted papers must not be submitted elsewhere during the ARR review period. This policy covers all journals and refereed and archival conferences and workshops without exception (e.g., TACL, Computational Linguistics, IJCAI, SIGIR, AAAI, ICASSP, ICML, NeurIPS, etc). In addition, we will not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere, without exception.
For the sake of clarity, this policy also covers ARR itself; authors may not resubmit to ARR work that is already under review to ARR.
Submissions that violate these requirements will be desk rejected.
Authors may resubmit to ACL Rolling Review.
- When resubmitting, authors must link to the previous submission.
- When resubmitting, authors should provide a response to the previous reviews.
- Resubmissions must be modified versions of the original submission; the authors may not simply resubmit the exact same paper, nor may they submit a completely new paper as if it were a resubmission.
- If authors want to add an author as part of a resubmission, they may do so with justification; except in extremely rare circumstances, authors may not be removed.
- Resubmitted papers will go back to the original reviewers and action editor, where possible, unless the authors request new reviewers.
Authors considering a resubmission should also refer to the withdrawal policy below.
Submissions that violate these requirements will be desk rejected.
Authors are required to honour the ethical code set out in the ACL Code of Ethics.
The consideration of the ethical impact of our research, use of data, and potential applications of our work has always been an important consideration, and as artificial intelligence is becoming more mainstream, these issues are increasingly pertinent. We ask that all authors read the code, and ensure that their work is conformant to this code. Authors are encouraged to devote a section of their paper to concerns of the ethical impact of the work and to a discussion of broader impacts of the work, which will be taken into account in the review process. This discussion may extend into a 5th page (short papers) or 9th page (long papers). In addition, we provide a responsible NLP research checklist which authors should upload alongside their paper.
We reserve the right to reject papers on ethical grounds, where the authors are judged to have operated counter to the code of ethics, or have inadequately addressed legitimate ethical concerns with their work. Indeed, the ARR review form includes a section addressing these issues and papers flagged for ethical concerns by reviewers or action editors will be further reviewed by the Ethics Advisory Committee (EAC).
Authors may withdraw their submission at any time. However, a submission that is withdrawn more than 48 hours after the submission deadline may not be resubmitted until the second subsequent ARR cycle, so withdrawing after this time requires contacting the action editors.
Submissions are withdrawn from one cycel and submitted to the next cycle will be desk rejected.
As indicated on the submission form, submitting to ARR comes with the requirement of accepting to review if asked to. We appreciate all the engagement of reviewers and AEs who are providing a crucial service to the community, which will benefit authors in their research: The success of peer review crucially depends on authors reviewing submissions by others. Hence, ARR will not be able to guarantee reviews of papers of authors who fail to fulfill their reviewer duties.
- AEs (and SACs) will not be asked to review new papers on top of their ARR duties (they might be asked to work on resubmissions of papers they already AEed/reviewed).
- There are of course legitimate reasons for one to suddenly be unavailable to review, and we will understand these.
- ARR has implemented a load balance check across cycles, so that reviewers are not overwhelmed with reviewing requests. The total load is limited to a certain level (around 8) over the past 3 months, so if you have many assignments over the past 1-2 ARR cycles you will have fewer (or even no assignments) in the current ARR cycle.
ARR provides a submission checklist. The checklist is intended as a reminder to help authors improve the quality of their papers.
Submission is electronic, using the OpenReview.net platform. All long, short and theme papers must follow the ACL Author Guidelines. Here are the paper submission form fields for your reference.
Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available from here (Latex and Word). Please follow the paper formatting guidelines general to "*ACL" conferences available here. Authors may not modify these style files or use templates designed for other conferences.
Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review.
Here is the current version of the review form, and here is the current version of the action editor meta-review form. These forms will be re-assessed and updated periodically.
ARR encourages the submission of these supplementary materials to improve the reproducibility of results, and to enable authors to provide additional information that does not fit in the paper. Supplementary materials may include appendices, software or data. For example, pre processing decisions, model parameters, feature templates, lengthy proofs or derivations, pseudocode, sample system inputs/outputs, and other details that are necessary for the exact replication of the work described in the paper can be put into appendices. However, if the pseudo-code or derivations or model specifications are an important part of the contribution, or if they are important for the reviewers to assess the technical correctness of the work, they should be a part of the main paper, and not appear in appendices. Reviewers are not required to consider material in appendices.
Appendices should come after the references in the submitted pdf, but do not count towards the page limit. Software should be submitted as a single .tgz or .zip archive, and data as a separate single .tgz or .zip archive. Supplementary materials must be fully anonymized to preserve the two-way anonymized reviewing policy.