ACL Rolling Review
ARR service qualifications
The most recent service qualifications at ARR are based on the sustainable reviewing policy, and supercede the earlier qualifications criteria.
Work in progress!
⚠️ This policy is new, and ARR is still working out the implementation details. We also receive a lot of questions. We will be posting any relevant clarifications and FAQ here and in the sustainable reviewing policy page (https://aclrollingreview.org/sustainable-reviewing-2026).
Reviewer qualifications
The updated reviewer qualifications are as follows:
- Those who have obtained their PhDs and/or have senior academic positions (postdoc/faculty), automatically qualify if they have at least 2 publications in major CL venues, Findings of the ACL (not industry or demo tracks), or other major relevant venues (see below).
- Doctoral students (but not bachelor and master students), as well as industry researchers with at least a Masters degree, automatically qualify if they have at least 3 publications in major CL events, Findings or major related venues (see below).
- Those who do not automatically qualify by these criteria can serve as secondary reviewers, mentored by a qualified primary reviewer, but cannot be designated service contributors by themselves.
Venues considered ‘major CL’ are: ACL, CL, COLING, CoNLL, EACL, EMNLP, HLT, IJCNLP / AACL, LREC, NAACL, TACL, *SEM, WMT, EAMT, INLG, SIGDIAL
For some of ARR tracks, other major relevant venues we recognize include:
- Clinical and Biomedical Applications: JAMIA, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, npj Digital Medicine, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, International Journal of Medical Informatics
- Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics: ICWSM
- Discourse and Pragmatics: Journal of Pragmatics
- Efficient Methods for NLP: ASPLOS
- Ethics, Bias, and Fairness: FAccT, AEIS
- Human-computer Interaction: CHI, ACM CSCW, UIST
- Information Retrieval: ECIR, SIGIR, WSDM, ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, CIKM, VLDB, ICDM
- Language modeling (security-related subareas): USENIX, CCS (ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security)
- Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics: Cognition, Journal of Memory and Language, Journal of Child Language, Language Learning, Cognitive Science, Language Acquisition
- Machine learning: AAAI, AISTATS, COLM, ICLR, ICML, IJCAI, JAIR, JMLR, KDD, NeurIPS, TMLR, TPAMI, WWW, ECAI
- Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP: Linguistic Typology, International Journal of Multilingualism, Language Documentation & Conservation, Diachronica
- Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond: CVPR, ECCV, ICCV
- NLP and Code Models: ICSE, FSE, ASE, ISSTA
- NLP and Symbolic Reasoning: Journal of Logic and Computation, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Journal of Logic, Language and Information
- Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation: Journal of Phonetics, the Journal of the International Phonetic Association
- Semantics: Lexical and Sentence-Level: Linguistics & Philosophy, Journal of Semantics
- Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech and Spoken Language Understanding: Interspeech, ICASSP
- Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing: Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
General linguistics venues relevant to multiple ARR tracks: SCiL, Language, Glossa, Applied Linguistics, Constructions and Frames, Journal of Linguistics, International Journal of Applied Linguistics
ARR is working on a way to ensure that the reviewers with expertise relevant to specific tracks would be assigned within those tracks.
What about <another venue>?
Venues considered major may be expanded over time and additional qualification criteria may be added over time as appropriate. The following conditions should be satisfied:
- the venue should be highly selective and top-tier in a given research area
- the focus of the venue clearly aligns with an existing ARR track: simply having publications that use NLP/ML methodology, or having some publications that align with a track, is not sufficient
- the publications should be indexed in DBLP
If you believe we are missing venues that match the above criteria, please see below whether your venue was already considered:
Venues we considered and did not accept: Applied Intelligence (Springer), IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Knowledge-Based Systems (Elsevier), EDBT, International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems (ACM CAIS), ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), IEEE Access, Information Fusion (Elsevier), ACM international joint conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, International ACM SIGIR Conference on Innovative Concepts and Theories in Information Retrieval (ICTIR)
If the venue you would like to propose is not among these, please apply through this form. ARR will consider the recommendations, and update this page with any further venues that were selected for addition. This process should be expected to take several weeks.
AC qualifications
The ARR area chairs must qualify as reviewers, and additionally:
- Either a completed PhD, or a main conference *CL publication from more than 5 years ago
- 2 papers in major CL venues or Findings
- 4 additional papers in either major CL events or major relevant venues
- Extensive reviewing experience
How to check if I am qualified?
The ARR automated checker beta is live now! Please log in to openreview, open this page, and click on ‘check my qualifications’. If you are deemed qualified, you will see a list of publications that confirm your qualifications. If that list is noisy (e.g. because your dblp profile is noisy) - you must de-select the noisy source, and rely on the manually curated publication list in yout OR profile, which you certify to be accurate. Misrepresenting reviewer identity or qualifications is subject to publication ethics sanctions.
If the automated check does not confirm your qualifications due to metadata issues (e.g. papers erroneously split across multiple dblp profiles, or papers in venues not indexed in DBLP), please enter the missing publications in your openreview profile, and re-run the check. Please make sure to include the valid paper DOI in the ‘html’ field in the paper upload interface, otherwise the checker will not work.
If you are not qualified according to your publication record and education level, but you have a sufficient service record, see here.
What if my paper is accepted but not published yet?
We can automatically confirm and take into account the status of papers accepted to *CL venues, which are associated with ARR cycles. So, e.g. EMNLP’26 or AACL’26 papers count for the purposes of October’26 cycle. Any other publications will have to wait for an official publication.
Do special tracks count?
The practices among special tracks between conferences vary significantly, and we do not have the resources to verify which ones are comparable to the main track. Currently, only main tracks are considered; Demonstration, Industry, SRW, Doctoral Consortium, Student Tracks, etc., are not included.
How to apply for manual verification?
Those who do not formally qualify under the above publication criteria, but satisfy the degree requirements and have substantially equivalent experience, may apply with documentation of their expertise and review experience for case-by-case consideration (e.g. with records from other venues where they served). In particular, those who have been sufficiently mentored as secondary reviewers in ARR cycles may be accepted as reviewers, even if they do not meet the strict publication thresholds, on a case-by-case basis.
To check eligibility, complete the following self-assessment. A link to the application form will be provided if eligible.
⚠️ The manual verification process focuses on reviewing experience, and does NOT consider publications. If you believe that you should qualify because of publications in unlisted venues, please apply for including that venue as described above.
⚠️ Important: Reviewing experience from workshops or unlisted venues will not be accepted. Likewise, Demonstration, Industry, SRW, Doctoral Consortium, Student Tracks, etc., are not included. Many workshops and tracks are relevant and high-quality events, but ARR does not have the resources for verifying what kind of review process they may run.
How do I become qualified through secondary reviewer?
For the junior researchers who do not yet qualify under the required combination of either reviewing-based criteria or publications + educational qualifications, but would like to become qualified for ARR service: we recommend working with a qualified researcher who would mentor you as a secondary reviewer, taking responsibility for the quality of your reviews and then providing a recommendation. Since secondary reviewing is capped to 5 reviews per individual in a given cycle, it is possible to become qualified in this way after serving in 2 ARR cycles.
It does not matter what institution the mentor is from, as long as they are mentoring you and are themselves qualified. It is possible to become qualified in this way without the Masters degree. The secondary reviewer contributions are recorded in the reviewing form by the supervisor: https://aclrollingreview.org/reviewerguidelines#secondary-reviewer
We hope to establish a program for helping independent researchers to find such mentors, but currently ARR cannot provide this yet.
Did you change the qualification rule for service contributors without PhD degree?
The qualification criterion was originally formulated as ‘at least 2 publications (not necessarily first-author) in major CL events, Findings or major related venues, and a total of >= 3 publications in total’ This formulation was a leftover from the prior ARR criteria, where 2 papers were required to be in major CL venues and the extra one could be from a related or CL venue. To broaden and simplify the criteria, and to qualify as many people from related communities as possible, we now allow all 3 papers for service contributors with a Masters degree to come from any venue in the approved list. We further considerably expanded the list of qualified related venues in response to community requests.