ARR abandons the MS Word Template for conference submissions. The submissions based on the Word template will be desk-rejected starting from March 2026.
Our past experience suggests that only a small fraction of the papers submitted through ARR are based on the MS Word Template. However, they receive a comparably high number of desk reject flags, because most reviewers are not used to the considerably different layout resulting from this template. The processing of this desk rejects increases the workload on (S)ACs, PCs and EiCs, and is stressful for the authors.
The rationale for maintaining the Word template has been to remain open to research communities from other disciplines who may be less used to LaTeX. However, at this point Overleaf also offers a WYSIWYG interface, the ACL template is available on this platform, and to the best of our knowledge it is not banned in any countries that have restrictions on i.e. Google products. This makes the burden for the few authors still relying on the MS Word Template more bearable, and reduces the learning curve to adapt to LaTeX. At the same time, the overall benefit for the community is high enough to justify this move.
This move would also facilitate the effort of automating some of the formatting checks post-submission, in order to reduce the workload on Reviewers, (S)ACs, PCs and EiCs. In the long run, we hope it could help to shorten the paper checklist.