In the March 2026 ARR cycle, we for the first time encouraged reviewers to try the experimental review support tool called REVAS. The instructions were communicated to the cycle reviewers, but we realized that we never wrote a blog post describing the initiative in more detail. We do this now, and apologize for the delay.

Starting with the ARR May cycle and continuing in subsequent cycles, ARR has updated the author and reviewer license agreements.

All authors will have to register as Reviewers or meta-reviewers (Area Chairs-ACs) on ARR (if you are already serving as Senior Area Chair (SAC), this is not necessary). Assignments will be made subsequently based on qualifications. The deadline for completing the registration form is January 7th 2026 EoD AoE.

From this cycle we intend to strictly monitor adherence to reviewing responsibilities.

As noted in the ACL’s Nov 29 announcement, OpenReview was notified on Nov 27 of a software bug that allowed unauthorized access to authors, reviewers, and area chairs. The ACL announcement details how any use of the leaked information may result in severe consequences. Thankfully, the OpenReview team was able to fix the issue quickly.

ARR abandons the MS Word Template for conference submissions. The submissions based on the Word template will be desk-rejected starting from March 2026.

The ACL Rolling Review (ARR) initiative is seeking nominations (including self-nominations) for several co-Editors-in-Chief (henceforth “EiCs”, with the “co-“ understood) positions, serving a 2.5-year term¹. Successful candidates should be able to start in September 2025 or as early as possible.

As discussed in the recent policy announcement, we are requiring that all ARR authors must complete a form to confirm that they will serve as reviewers or ACs if asked. As the policy specifies, authors are allowed to ask for a duty exemption and provide a reason. This document provides a categorization of acceptable and unacceptable reasons for such exemptions that will begin to be enforced starting from the July 2025 ARR cycle.

Starting with EMNLP 2025, the responsible NLP checklist will be included as appendices with their papers.

TLDR:

We want to highlight two important changes we are implementing for the February cycle: (1) a minimum review load requirement for those volunteer reviewers who are nominated for multiple submissions, and (2) the possibility of nominating an experienced colleague as a reviewing volunteer for a submission.

The Association for Computational Linguistics Rolling Review (ARR) seeks a workflow manager to support the regular operations of ARR bi-monthly reviewing cycles. This position sits at the heart of the peer-review infrastructure that handles our major ACL conferences. The goal of this role is to support the customization of the infrastructure used by ARR, which currently is OpenReview.

The Association for Computational Linguistics Rolling Review (ARR) is seeking an editorial assistant to support the regular operations of ARR bi-monthly reviewing cycles. This position sits at the heart of the peer-review team that handles our major ACL conferences. The goal of this role is to support the editors-in-chief by managing some of the standard tasks involved in the peer-review process, such as supporting the communication between EiCs, the Senior Area Chairs, and the rest of the research community.

The ACL Rolling Review (ARR) initiative is seeking nominations (self-nominations are permitted and encouraged), for several co-Editors-in-Chief (henceforth “EiCs”, with the “co-” understood) positions, serving a 2.5-year term¹. Successful candidates should be able to start at the end of summer or as early as possible.

[tldr:] ARR is expanding its data collection to further insights. Authors can now consent to donate their paper reviews and meta data during paper submission, reviewers and ACs can consent to donate their data for the cycle. Consider donating your peer-review data! You can always revisit this decision as needed.

As we continue to add incremental changes to our review process, and OpenReview (OR) infrastructure, we want to highlight an important change that will be implemented for the upcoming April cycle: a reviewing workload requirement.

Submissions will open on April 4th for the April ARR Cycle. The site is available here.

Anna Rogers is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her main research area is Natural Language Processing, in particular analysis and evaluation of pre-trained language models. She is a veteran program chair of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023), the lead author of the current ARR guidelines for reviewers, and contributor to the Responsible NLP Checklist.

By Malihe Alikhani and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran

Thank you to all of the reviewers from the October 2023 cycle! Your effort was critical to getting high quality reviews back to authors on time.

The ACL has adopted a new anonymity policy effective for all future submissions, including to ARR. This new policy replaces the old policy that prohibited authors from posting or advertising non-anonymous preprints during a period starting one month before the submission or commitment deadline, and continuing while the submission is under review.

We have now completed the paper assignment to reviewers, and the review process has started.

We have been busy with housekeeping tasks after the submission period ended. In brief, at this time we have: - Added authors of October submissions to the reviewing pool - Assigned papers to Action Editors (AEs), Senior Action Editors (SAEs) and reviewers - Sent instructions to AEs and SAEs re their ToDo tasks

The use of an ARR-only submission process has been agreed by Program Chairs (PCs), and General Chairs of the upcoming conferences in 2024 (EACL, NAACL and ACL, referred to in this document as *CL conferences), with feedback from the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) Initiative, the ARR board, and the ACL Exec. There will be no direct submission option. This decision was announced during the ACL 2023 business meeting. The purpose of this communication is to update those that were not present, and to provide more details about the coordinated plan. In this document, submission deadline refers to the paper submission to the ARR reviewing portal in Open Review. Commitment deadline refers to the deadline for authors to submit their fully ARR-reviewed submission to the conference portal for consideration at that conference. Decisions available refer to the deadline by which conference PCs will send notifications to paper authors.

At ACL 2023, there was a plenary session dedicated to updates from ARR and questions from the community (slides). We did not have time to answer all of the questions in the session and not everyone in the community was able to attend the session. To be as open as possible, below we have written answers to all of the questions submitted online and asked in person. In some cases, we have grouped together related questions. We have also created a video explaining the details of ARR and rewritten our author information page (thanks to Nathan Schneider for leading the rewrite!) to provide clarity on the process.

We’re pleased to announce that Malihe Alikhani has accepted to take on the role of Ethics co-chair for ARR. Malihe works towards designing inclusive and equitable language technologies. She develops systems that can communicate and collaborate with diverse populations, especially those from underserved communities. She studies how learning models might become biased and how we can mitigate them. She is currently an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. Beginning in the Fall of 2023, she will move to Northeastern University.

We have added an FAQ on the on-going peer review data collection! Check it out for more information on the data and how you can contribute.

See the latest updates, Stats, and FAQs from ACL Rolling Reviews that were presented in EACL 2023. You can find the presentation slides here.

We’re delighted to share the news that Vinodkumar Prabhakaran is joining the ACL RR team as Ethics Chair. Vinod is a senior research scientist at Google’s Responsible AI org, working on issues at the intersection of AI and society.

The major changes happening for the December cycle are the introduction of Senior Action Editors (SAEs), and a new reviewing assignment process to include at least one non-student reviewer per paper. These changes are also a response to community feedback. SAEs will help us during key phases of the review process. They will provide another layer of review quality control for reviewers and AEs. The team of SAEs is almost complete and will be added to the website pretty soon.

As promised in our blog entry for August, ACL has established an ARR board that will oversee the activities of ARR. We suggest readers go back to that blog entry for more information on the responsibilities of the board. In this update to the community we would like to formally welcome the founding members of the ARR Board:

At ARR, we are slowly and steadily making changes to reflect the ACL reviewing survey results. In its October 15th cycle, we bring two key changes.

In May and June, the ACL reviewing committee conducted a survey on the future of reviewing in the ACL community. Follow this link for results and analysis of the survey, including both the multiple choice questions and the free-text responses.

Two new EICs have started their service (and several new EiCs are expected to start soon): * Mausam * Thamar Solorio

Starting from the July 2022 ARR cycle, the Reviewers and Action Editors can specify their unavailability and maximum load directly in OpenReview. Load specification is designed as a reviewer/AE task in OpenReview, to be completed before the submission deadline for the respective cycle (for the July 22 cycle, the deadline for specifying the max. load is July 15). A detailed guide on how to declare your max. load / unavailability can be found here.

Starting with the April 15 deadline, there will be a brief period for author response within the ARR review cycle. * for 5 days after the deadline for regular reviews, authors can make comments on the reviews, using the discussion forum within OpenReview (as is done, for example, with ICLR) * the comments should be limited to clear factual errors or serious misunderstandings * reviewers may respond to authors’ comments or update their reviews, but are not obligated to do so * action editors will take these comments into account when writing their metareview

Effective the 15 April 2022 deadline, with permission of the ACL executive and the ACL committee on reviewing, ARR will be moving to a six-week cycle with deadlines every six weeks.

Action editors and reviewers may now request letters of recognition for their ARR service! Instructions can be found in the: * Action editors’ guide to OpenReview * Reviewers’ guide to OpenReview

We have data. Thanks to great work from Sebastin Santy on our tech team, we now have a regularly updated statistics dashboard for ACL Rolling Review. When you refer to it, please note the last updated date as data for the current cycles may be somewhat delayed. As always, feedback welcome.

One of the initiatives that ARR supports is the ongoing collection of data about peer-review in NLP. Nils Dycke, Ilia Kuznetsov and Iryna Gurevych have been leading an ACL-approved initiative to collect review data on an opt-in basis. They provide a status update and invite discussion here.

As an author, reviewer or action editor for OpenReview, when and how should you declare a conflict of interest?

For the December cycle, ARR will have a slightly modified timeline. Reviews will be released on January 28th given that reviewing started a bit later due to the end of the semester, the overlapping heavy load from November and the holidays. We also wanted to give a bit more time to AEs to be mindful of weekend days. * December 15th: Submission deadline * December 16th-24th: Reviewer/AE assignment * December 24th-28th: SAC/AE paper check and reassignment * December 29th-January 18th: Reviewing * January 19th-27th: Meta-reviews and reviewer chasing * January 28th: Review and meta-review release

We have received several questions about resubmitting to ARR. We have now modified the call for papers to address these questions, which have to do with adding/removing authors, providing responses to reviewers, and requesting new reviewers.

There is no need to withdraw any papers from ARR after reviewing is complete (in fact if you do withdraw your paper from an ARR cycle, we won’t be able to transfer that paper + reviews to any venue you “commit” to). Once you have your reviews, your paper is considered to no longer be under review to ARR.

As in November, ARR will have a slightly modified timeline in January (ntoe that all deadlines are 11:59pm AOE): * January 15th: Submission deadline * January 16th-24th: Reviewer/AE assignment * January 24th-27th: SAC/AE paper check and reassignment * January 28th-February 15th: Reviewing * February 16th-26th: Meta-reviews and reviewer chasing * February 27th: Review release

We are introducing several changes to ACL Rolling Review starting with the December 2021 deadline.

For November, working with the ACL 2022 senior area chairs and program chairs, we will have a slightly modified ARR timeline. * Nov 19-22 - SACs check AE assignments * Nov 25 - finalized AE assignments * November 27 - AEs notified of assignments * Nov 27-29 - desk rejects and manual check of reviewer assignment by AEs * Nov 29 - Reviewers notified of assignments
* Nov 29 - Dec 27: reviewing * Dec 28-29 - AEs find emergency reviewers and lead discussions * Dec 28-31 - Emergency reviewing * Dec 28-Jan 7 - AEs prepare meta reviews * Jan 10, 2022 - ARR reviews for a Nov 15 submission sent to the authors * Jan 15, 2022 - ACL 2022 commitment deadline

We have a new reviewer tutorial! Thanks to Anna Rogers and Isabelle Augenstein for creating it.

November submissions are open! Please submit your papers here.

We are recruiting volunteer emergency reviewers and emergency action editors. To volunteer, fill out (Update: These forms are no longer in use. Please contact the editors to volunteer): * Emergency action editor form * Emergency reviewer form

The ACL Rolling Review (ARR) officially kicked off in early 2021, with the first call for papers in April, and the first deadline in May. This initiative was started with the promise of a unified reviewer pool, more consistent reviewing, lower average reviewer load, and faster submission to publication timelines.

We have openings for members of a new “communications team.” This role (alongside the current communications lead) would encompass website updates, social media presence, and triaging/responding to support email. To apply, contact editors at aclrollingreview.org.

We are looking for a few extra members of the technical staff, who implement the OpenReview interface, automated systems for reviewer management, paper-reviewer matching, etc. Please contact cto@aclrollingreview.org with a quick self-introduction if interested!

We have added a dates page. * Authors, refer to this page for a list of ARR participating venues and important dates. * Reviewers and action editors, refer to this page for relevant dates each month. * Conference and workshop organizers, refer to this page to figure out what the last ARR submission date should be for submissions to your venue. Contact us to have your venue added.

We have an opening for a PR lead. Responsibilities: maintain website; manage social media presence; liaise with ACL publicity chairs. To apply, contact editors at aclrollingreview.org.

We are sending invitations out to action editors and reviewers. And we have submissions!! Thank you for volunteering, responding to invites, submitting! Please create / update your Open Review profile so we can do good conflict of interest handling and paper matching.

if you are running an ACL-affiliated conference or workshop, you can use ARR to accept submissions! Please contact the ARR editors (editors@aclrollingreview.org) and we will be happy to set it up for you.

The draft review forms are up at here! And we still welcome volunteer reviewers/action editors!

ACL Rolling Review is now accepting submissions! Please go to the Authors page to preview the fields in the submission form and find the link to the submission site.

We invite you to express interest in becoming a reviewer or action editor for ACL Rolling Review via our reviewer interest survey.

The ACL Rolling Review call for papers is up. The first submission deadline will be 15 May 2021, which is also the last submission deadline to be considered for the EMNLP 2021 main conference.

ACL Rolling Review is here! We’ll be running a first trial with EMNLP 2021 (thank you very very much to the organizers!).