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.