ACL Rolling Review Pilot

ACL Rolling Review (ARR) is a new initiative of the Association for Computational Linguistics, where the reviewing and acceptance of papers to publication venues is done in a two-step process: (1) centralized rolling review and (2) submission to a publication venue. The purpose of ACL Rolling Review is to improve efficiency and turnaround of reviewing in *ACL conferences while keeping the diversity (geographic and otherwise) and editorial freedom. More information about this initiative can be found in the ACL Rolling Review Proposal.

Working closely with the ACL Rolling Review organizers, we are running a pilot on EMNLP 2021. Papers will need to satisfy the following conditions, as also stated in the call for papers, in order to be considered by EMNLP:

• The paper needs to be submitted to ARR by May 15th.
  We have this condition mostly for fairness and therefore will not consider papers submitted to ARR after the EMNLP full paper submission deadline, May 17th. We choose May 15th because the ARR submission due day is the 15th of each month.
• The ARR reviews of the paper needs to be completed before July 29th.
  The ARR papers and reviews will be evaluated by senior area chairs, along with regular EMNLP submissions between July 29th and August 6.

In addition, given that this is the first ARR pilot and is running in parallel with the traditional reviewing pipeline, if EMNLP receives a large number of submissions from ARR, we will consider capping the number of papers that will be evaluated by EMNLP (e.g., 100 submissions).

Because ARR and EMNLP use two different software systems, the papers and reviews from ARR will be imported to the SoftConf system. Both the authors and ARR editors in chief will be notified by EMNLP of the accept/reject decision on August 25.