CALL FOR PAPERS

ACL Rolling Review (ARR) invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.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 the 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 deadlines every two months. Review is handled by an action editor, and revision and resubmission of papers is allowed.
  • Step 2 – Commitment to a Publication Venue: A publication venue is a conference or workshop that accepts reviews from ARR. When an opportunity to commit to a publication venue comes around, authors may submit papers with fully completed review (including meta reviews). Program chairs decide the process for committing ARR reviewed papers, as well as the criteria and process for deciding to accept a subset of these submissions into their event.

SUBMISSIONS

All topics in Computational Linguistics / Natural Language Processing are covered by ARR. At submission, papers must select a topic area to assist with AE and reviewer matching. The current set of areas are (in alphabetical order):

  • Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
  • Dialogue and Interactive Systems
  • Discourse and Pragmatics
  • Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for NLP
  • Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
  • Generation
  • Human-centered NLP
  • Information Extraction
  • Information Retrieval and Text Mining
  • Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
  • Language Modeling
  • Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics
  • Machine Learning for NLP
  • Machine Translation
  • Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP
  • Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
  • NLP Applications
  • Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation
  • Question Answering
  • Resources and Evaluation
  • Semantics: Lexical and Sentence-Level
  • Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
  • Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech and Spoken Language Understanding
  • Summarization
  • Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

For more information about how to choose the right area, see this page.

In addition, ARR welcomes submissions related to special Themes proposed by participating publication venues.

PAPER SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Long Papers

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 limitations (required, see below) and optionally ethical considerations
  • plus unlimited pages of references

Submissions that exceed the length requirements, or are missing a limitations section, will be desk rejected.

Short Papers

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 limitations (required, see below) and optionally ethical considerations
  • plus unlimited pages of references

Submissions that exceed the length requirements, or are missing a limitations section, will be desk rejected.

Instructions for Two-Way Anonymized Review

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 should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers.

Supplementary materials should also be anonymized. This includes author responses during the review process.

Submissions that violate these requirements will be desk rejected.

ARR is subject to the ACL Policies for Review and Citation, which were updated in early 2024. Beginning with the February 15, 2024 ARR deadlines, there is no anonymity period or limitation on posting or discussing non-anonymous preprints while the work is under peer review.

Authorship

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.

Please notice that once the paper has been submitted, no changes to the list of authors are allowed.

Citation and Comparison

Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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.

For more information, see the ACL Policies for Review and Citation.

Multiple Submission Policy

There are several cases to consider:

  1. ARR + Other Venue: 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.
  2. ARR + Commitment: The commitment process is treated as being under review for a conference. That means (a) while in an active review cycle at ARR, a paper cannot be committed to a conference, and (b) between commitment to a conference and a decision or withdrawal, a paper cannot be submitted to ARR. For example, if you got reviews in the June 2023 cycle, you cannot both commit to EMNLP (August 22nd deadline) and submit a revised version to the August 2023 ARR cycle. Note that this is a change of policy relative to the early days of ARR, when this type of dual submission was permitted for ACL and NAACL 2022.
  3. Commitment + Commitment/Other Venue: Whether you can commit/submit to two venues simultaneously depends on the dual submission policies of those venues. Typically, it is not permitted.
  4. ARR + ARR: 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. As of 2023, ARR does not have overlapping cycles, and so this is a moot point.

Submissions that violate requirements 1, 2, or 4 will be desk rejected.

Resubmission Policy

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 that address issues raised by the reviewers and meta review; the authors may not simply resubmit the exact same paper, nor may they submit a completely new paper as if it were a resubmission. Resubmissions that ignore relevant feedback provided during the previous review round can be desk rejected by the EiC team.
  • 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.

Ethics Policy

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 about 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 must complete as part of their paper submission.

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).

AI Writing Assistance Policy

ARR has adopted the ACL 2023 Policy on AI Writing Assistance. The policy introduces a new item in the responsible research checklist, where authors disclose use of AI assistance. Common cases that should / should not be disclosed are:

Uses that do not need to be disclosed:

  • Assistance purely with the language of the paper, e.g., paraphrasing, spell-checking, or polishing the author’s original content, without suggesting new content.
  • Short-form input assistance, e.g., smart compose in google docs, which generates a short continuation of text.
  • Literature search, e.g., to identify relevant literature, which authors then read, discuss, and cite appropriately.

Uses that need to be disclosed:

  • Low-novelty text, e.g., producing a description of a widely known concept. Specify where such text was used, and convince the reviewers that the generation was checked to be accurate and is accompanied by relevant and appropriate citations (e.g., using block quotes for verbatim copying). If the generation copies text verbatim from existing work, the authors need to acknowledge all relevant citations: both the source of the text used and the source of the idea(s).
  • New ideas. If the model outputs read to the authors as new research ideas, that would deserve co-authorship or acknowledgement from a human colleague, and that the authors then developed themselves (e.g. topics to discuss, framing of the problem) - we suggest acknowledging the use of the model, and checking for known sources for any such ideas to acknowledge them as well. Most likely, they came from other people’s work.
  • New ideas + new text: a contributor of both ideas and their execution seems like the definition of a co-author, which the models cannot be. While the norms around the use of generative AI in research are being established, we would discourage such use in ARR submissions. If you choose to go down this road, you are welcome to make the case to the reviewers that this should be allowed, and that the new content is in fact correct, coherent, original and does not have missing citations.
  • Code writing assistants. Acknowledge the use of such systems and the scope thereof, e.g. in the README files accompanying the code attachments or repositories.

In all cases, authors are responsible for the correctness of their methods, results, and writing. Authors should check for potential plagiarism, both of text and code.

Limitations (required section)

Authors are required to discuss the limitations of their work in a dedicated section titled “Limitations”. This section should be included at the end of the paper, before the references, and it will not count toward the page limit. This includes both, long and short papers. Papers without a limitations section will be desk rejected. Note, prior to the December 2023 cycle, this was optional.

Withdrawal Policy

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.

Reviewing Requirements

Submitting to ARR comes with two reviewing requirements.

First, all authors are expected to review if asked to. There are of course legitimate reasons for one to suddenly be unavailable to review, and we will understand these. For example, already serving in ARR in another capacity.

Second, at least one author must participate in the review process, unless an exception applies (e.g., every authors is either new to the community, has insufficient experience, or is already serving in another capacity). Papers that do not meet this requirement, and are not covered by an exception, may be desk rejected. See this blog post for further information about this new (as of April 2024) requirement.

Authors who will review are provided at submission time. They must:

  1. Have an updated OpenReview profile, including affiliation, semantic scholar link, dblp link, and an email address where they can receive OpenReview messages.
  2. Have published at least three papers in *CL conferences in the last 5 years.
  3. Once added as a reviewer, the person must promptly complete their reviewer registration form for the cycle.

Note that ARR has implemented a load balance check across cycles, so that reviewers are not overwhelmed with reviewing assignments.

Submission Criteria

ARR provides a submission checklist. The checklist is intended as a reminder to help authors improve the quality of their papers.

Paper Submission and Templates

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 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.

Desk Rejection

Papers can be desk rejected for a variety of reasons, as described above. Note that this can occur at any time in the review cycle.

Optional Supplementary Materials: Appendices, Software, and Data

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.