The Association for Computational Linguistics is pursuing a new initiative (https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Rolling_Review_Proposal) to improve the review process for conferences and workshops. The first deadline for submissions to the new ACL Rolling Review system is 15 May 2021, and the deadline will be the 15th of each month thereafter. For the link to each month's submission site, please see https://aclrollingreview.org/authors.

ACL Rolling Review (ARR) invites the submission of long and short papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.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 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 deadline on the 15th of each month. Review is handled by an action editor, and revision and resubmission of papers is allowed.
* Step 2 -- Submission to Publication Venue: A publication venue is a conference or workshop that participates in ARR. When an opportunity to submit to a
publication venue comes around, authors may submit already reviewed papers with reviews to the publication venue, through the OpenReview website. Program chairs (possibly with the help of senior area chairs) will then accept a subset of submitted papers for presentation.

## SUBMISSIONS

Relevant topics for ARR include, but are not limited to, the following areas (in alphabetical order):
* Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
* Dialogue and Interactive Systems
* Discourse and Pragmatics
* Ethics and NLP
* Information Extraction
* Information Retrieval and Text Mining
* Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
* Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
* Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
* Machine Learning for NLP
* Machine Translation and Multilinguality
* NLP Applications
* Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
* Question Answering
* Resources and Evaluation
* Semantics: Lexical
* Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas
* Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
* Speech and Multimodality
* Summarization
* Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

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 unlimited pages of references.

### 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 unlimited pages of references.

### Anonymity Period

ACL has policies for submission, review and citation (https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Policies_for_Submission,_Review_and_Citation) designed to protect the integrity of two-way anonymized review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. A paper can only be (re)submitted to ARR if it has been anonymous for at least a month before the first submission, and it must remain anonymous while it is under review.

* Authors may allow their anonymized submission to be publicly available on OpenReview while it is under ARR review.
* Authors may not make a non-anonymized version of their paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper, we mean another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length.
* If the authors have posted a non-anonymized version of their paper online before the start of the anonymity period, they may submit an anonymized version to ARR. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and the authors must inform the editors in chief that a non-anonymized version exists.
* Authors may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask authors not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise two-way anonymized reviewing during the anonymity period.
* Note that, while authors are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make two-way anonymized reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage authors to wait. Alternatively, authors may consider submitting your work to the Computational Linguistics journal, which does not require anonymization and has a track for “short” (i.e., conference-length) papers.

### 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 that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

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

Supplementary materials should also be anonymized.

### 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.

### Citation and Comparison

Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your 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 Submission, Review, and Citation (https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Policies_for_Submission,_Review_and_Citation).

### Multiple Submission Policy

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.

### Ethics Policy

Authors are required to honour the ethical code set out in the [ACL Code of Ethics](https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/acl-code-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. Where a paper may raise ethical issues, we ask that authors include in the paper an explicit discussion of these issues, which will be taken into account in the review process. 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).

Authors are encouraged to devote a section of their paper to concerns of the ethical impact of the work and to a discussion of broader impacts of the work.

### Submission Criteria

ARR will provide a submission checklist that authors will be asked to answer during paper submission. The checklist is intended as a reminder to help authors improve the quality of their papers. The author instruction on the checklist will be available Coming soon.

### Paper Submission and Templates

Submission is electronic, using the OpenReview.net platform. All long, short and theme papers must follow the ACL Author Guidelines (https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Author_Guidelines).

Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available as an Overleaf template (https://www.overleaf.com/read/crtcwgxzjskr) and also downloadable directly (https://github.com/acl-org/ACLPUB/tree/master/templates) (Latex and Word). Please follow the paper formatting guidelines general to "\*ACL" conferences available at https://acl-org.github.io/ACLPUB/formatting.html.
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.

### 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.