Starting with EMNLP 2025, the responsible NLP checklist will be included as appendices with their papers.
What this means
If your paper gets accepted to EMNLP 2025, your completed responsible NLP checklist will be published alongside your paper as an appendix. This is a new requirement that will also apply to subsequent *ACL conferences.
Background
Authors are already familiar with the Responsible NLP Research Checklist - it has been part of ARR submissions for some time now. It covers areas such as:
- How you collected and annotated data
- What datasets you used and their limitations
- Your training and evaluation setup
- Potential impacts of your work
- Computational costs
We have always used these checklists during review. Filling them out incorrectly or misleadingly can result in desk rejection.
What changes for authors
If you are planning to commit to EMNLP 2025, here is what you need to know:
Your checklist responses will be public if your paper is accepted. Authors will therefore want to be extra careful and thorough when completing the checklist. Checklists do not count against page limits. They are included as an appendix.
Why we are doing this
Making these checklists public should help with transparency. Other researchers will be able to see how you handled ethical considerations, which datasets you used, what limitations you acknowledged, and so on. This may also encourage people to think more carefully about these issues when they know their answers will be visible to the broader community.