ACL Rolling Review
ARR service qualifications
The most recent service qualifications at ARR are based on the sustainable reviewing policy, and supersede the earlier qualifications criteria.
Work in progress!
⚠️ This policy is new, and ARR is still working out the implementation. Some details may change. 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, excluding associated workshops).
- 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
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, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Computational Social Science (JCSS)
- Dialogue and Interactive Systems: Dialogue and Discourse, SIGDIAL
- Discourse and Pragmatics: Journal of Pragmatics
- Efficient Methods for NLP: ASPLOS
- Ethics, Bias, and Fairness: FAccT, AIES
- Human-computer Interaction: CHI, ACM CSCW (PACM HCI), 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, ECML PKDD
- 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 applications: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), ACM RecSys
- 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, Journal of Language Modelling
- 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, Transactions of the Philological Society
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>?
In the period running up to October 2026 submission deadline, we have solicited and considered nearly a hundred proposals for venue inclusion. As a result, our list of qualifying venues has been considerably extended, and we plan to use this list for the time being. We may reopen the venue suggestion in a year if there is evidence of significant gaps in coverage of relevant expertise. We may also revoke the inclusion of certain venues if it turns out that the mismatch between review expectations and practices in our fields is too big.
As a general rule, 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 venue should be single-field: multi-field venues that cater to multiple disciplines, such as PNAS, also cannot be accommodated, since the expertise of authors publishing there may not be relevant for reviewing at ARR with extra verification
- the publications should be indexed in DBLP
- the area of expertise should not be sufficiently covered by the existing selection. In general, we do not plan to consider further journals related to ML and IR, since these areas of expertise are extensively covered and already provide a point of entry for these communities
The following venues have been considered and not included:
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), 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), Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE), ACM International Conference on Multimedia, CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC), IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B / IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, The Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society, Journal of Innovation in Digital Ecosystems, IEEE Big Data, Journal of Informetrics (JOI), Elsevier Neurocomputing, The Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI), IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), Management Science, International Conference on AI in Education, ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale, IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2025 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Springer Nature Computer Science, International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM), International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA), PLOS Computational Biology, Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB), Annals of Mathematics, SIAM Journal on Optimization, SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis (SINUM), Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computing (JAMC), Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics (CPAM), The Annals of Statistics
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!
To test it, 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 your OR profile, which you certify to be accurate. Misrepresenting reviewer identity or qualifications is subject to publication ethics sanctions.
If you are not qualified according to your publication record and education level, but you have a sufficient service record, see here.
Q: The checker finds enough publications, but I’m still not qualified!
A: Please make sure that your education history is also fully included in your OpenReview profile. At least your highest education degree should be reflected - make sure you have a field listing B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D. or your other relevant degree. If you have not completed it yet, please add ‘student’. E.g. the field for the completed degree should state Ph.D., and for an in-progress degree or degree that was not completed - Ph.D. student.
Q: How do I get my papers into my openreview profile?
A: You can import from a dblp or an orcid profile in your openreview profile, just add the corresponding links and press ‘add papers to profile’. Do check that the list is correct and contains only the work you did (co-)author. Misrepresentation of credentials is subject to publication ethics committee sanctions.
Q: The checker says I’m unqualified but I was manually verified for reviewing experience
A: You don’t have to do anything, the checker currently only looks at the publications. A warning email in October erroneously included people who had passed manual verification, apologies for the confusion.
Q: My recent paper is accepted but missing from the checker
A: 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 official publication + being ingested in the databases used for verification. We are aware that the recently accepted papers from some venues like NeurIPS are listed in OpenReview profiles, but for technical reasons this cannot be supported for verification. At the current scale, ARR cannot offer manual verification, and there will be no exeptions.
Q: My paper in another venue is missing from the checker
A: Please see above. We do not currently plan to add more venues.
Q: My paper is missing due to metadata issues
A: 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.
Q: I’ve nominated an unqualified person as a contributor, will the paper be desk rejected?
A: No, it will go in the lottery
Q: I’ve nominated the wrong person as a contributor
A: Metadata is still editable, up until 48h after submission deadline. Open submission, ‘edit’ in the top right corner
Q: Do I get a double load if I am both a contributor and also signed up as a volunteer reviewer?
A: No, designated contributor overrides volunteer settings
Contributor forms FAQ
This section contains FAQ for the contributor forms and interface. For the general policy questions on contributors, see this page.
Q: Where is the contributor form?
A: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/ARR/2026/October/Contributors
Q: The link to contributor form says ‘not found’
A: The contributor console is available to the named contributor only, after they were nominated in the submission form. Double-check that the correct profile is indicated in the submission form, and that it is the named contributor who is trying to access the contributor console. Console: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/ARR/2026/October/Contributors
Q: The contributor console doesn’t show the expected paper
A: Please double-check that the contributor profile is correctly indicated in the contributor field in the submission. Sometimes profiles are mixed up (e.g. ~John_Smith1 instead of ~John_Smith2).
Q: Which forms are overall necessary for a paper at submission?
A: See here: aclrollingreview.org/authors#submission-forms
Q: Should I fill both reviewer and contributor forms?
A: If you are serving as a designated service contributor, you may see both ‘reviewer’ and ‘contributor’ consoles. In that case, you only need to register in the contributor consoles, and the registration form needs to be filled out only once even if you serve for two submissions.
Q: How many times should I fill out the contributor form?
A: Once, even if you serve for two submissions.
Q: How to check which submissions I will serve for, and object if needed?
A: Log into the contributor console. It now displays the list of all submissions nominating you. For each one you can select if you consent, if it something you know but the nomination was made in error, or if it is something you have no idea about and never consented to. There is a drop-down list of options to the right of each paper in the list.
Q: How can I confirm that my submission is ‘safe’ from the lottery?
A: At present, you can check that (a) the intended contributor is correctly stated in your submission form, and (b) the contributor can then check whether they are either qualified according to the checker, or have received manual verification. They should then verify whether they can see their submitted contributor form in the contributor console, and your submission is listed there, and they have agreed to it, and the total number of submissions is under max capacity. If all of this is correct, you are ‘safe’. We hope to be able to develop a more straightforward confirmation process in the future. Note that this only refers to the lottery process. You can still be DR-ed for other reasons like including formatting, as well as authors missing OR profiles or ORCIDs.
Can I get qualified partly with publications and partly with reviewing?
No, you need to be qualified through at least one of these mechanisms.
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 completed at least a Bachelor degree and 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 reviewing?
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.
Do resubmissions still need to bring in a service contributor?
See here.
What are the qualifications for students in Masters+PhD programs?
If you are in an integrated Masters+Phd program that has a Masters-level qualifying exam, indicate your status as ‘PhD student’ after you’ve passed it, and as ‘Masters student’ before. If there is no such exam, indicate your status as ‘Masters student’ in the first two years of your program, and as ‘PhD student’ afterwards.
Do the papers for reviewer qualifications have to be first-author?
The current qualification criteria do not consider the position in the author list.