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2024Q1 Reports: ACL 2024

2024-01-17T08:10:56Z

Iryna Gurevych: Created page with "The '''ACL 2024 conference''' will take place in Bangkok, from August 11th to 16th, 2024. It is all on track for the conference: * The CFP is about to be launched. * Monthly..."

The '''ACL 2024 conference''' will take place in Bangkok, from August 11th to 16th, 2024. It is all on track for the conference:

* The CFP is about to be launched.
* Monthly meetings are held with GC, PC and Jennifer.
* The conference website is live listing [https://2024.aclweb.org/program/workshops/ workshops] and [https://2024.aclweb.org/program/tutorials/ tutorials].
* We are currently discussing the optimal distribution of poster sessions and oral presentations for the main conference.
* We have a shared space on Slack for all chairs.
* Next tasks are:
** Student workshop CFP
** Finalizing workshop dates

The '''ACL anonymity policy group''' has concluded its work with a [https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php/ACL_Anonymity_Policy report and recommendations]; it will be implemented for ACL 2024 on time.

ACL Conference Awards Policy

2024-01-12T13:50:02Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Additional Award Slots for Unpublicized Work */ full name of Exec

This document lays out a standard protocol for awards at ACL conferences (Note that for conferences colocated with a non-ACL event there may need to be some adjustments depending on the policies of the other event. Also, this process was not developed for workshops or journals.). The goal of introducing the policy is to have a consistent approach that suits the scale of our conferences today. The policy is designed to highlight work that is interesting along a variety of axes in ways that encourage discussion. Recognizing valuable work in a consistent way also means the value is clearer (e.g., for hiring and tenure cases).

== Award Types and Criteria ==

=== Best Paper Award ===

We define "Best" as work that is particularly fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, and/or potentially field-changing.

* "Best Paper Award": Typically no more than 6 papers receive this award. These papers are presented in a plenary session at the conference. PCs should consider scheduling this plenary session early in the conference, to encourage discussion of the papers during the conference.
* "Outstanding Paper Award": 1.5–2.5% of accepted papers, selected as part of the same process. This allows for broader recognition of work that meets the criteria.
* "Area Chair's Award": Up to one paper per track. These are selected by the SACs for each track.
* Short and long papers are considered together for these awards.

=== Test of Time Award ===

See the policy at [[Test-of-Time Papers Award]].

=== Special Categories ===

Two special awards will recognise work with a particular focus as described below. Papers that receive an award in a special category are also eligible to receive a general award.
* Social Impact Award - For papers that have the potential for significant positive societal impact.
* Resource Award - For papers that announce, describe, and share a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new resource (e.g., a dataset or knowledge graph).

Program Committee Chairs may also choose to include awards for other categories. Examples
of additional special categories include:
* Software Award - For papers that describe and share (ideally via source code) a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new piece of software. Note that this is not the same as the Demonstration Paper Award since there could be papers outside of that track that meet this criterion.
* Demonstration Paper Award - For papers in the Demonstration Track.
* Theme Paper Award - For papers on the conference’s theme.
* Linguistic Insight Award - For papers that make a particularly significant contribution to our understanding of language.
* Low-Resource Paper Award - For papers that contribute to work on languages or domains with limited data.
* Interdisciplinary Research Award - For papers that contribute to NLP and another field in new and interesting ways.
* Reproduction Award - For papers that reproduce prior work in a particularly enlightening way, revealing additional features of the prior work.

=== Additional Award Slots for Unpublicized Work ===

In January 2024, the ACL Executive Committee voted to adopt [[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|recommendations]] including the following:

<blockquote>Add new best and outstanding paper awards for submissions that remained anonymous to the public during the whole process, to ameliorate the “publicity deficit” for such submissions. (The precise eligibility criteria for these awards would be at the discretion of the awards committee. Of course, such submissions would remain eligible also for all other awards.)</blockquote>

== Selection Process ==

=== Nominations ===

In the review process, reviewers (Note: PCs may choose whether or not to include reviewers in the nomination process.), AEs, ACs, and SACs will be asked to answer the following questions:

* 1. "Could the camera-ready version of this paper merit consideration for an "outstanding paper" award (up to 2.5% of accepted papers will be recognized in this way)? Outstanding papers should be either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing. Awards will be decided based on the camera-ready version of the paper."
** "Yes"
** "Maybe"
** "No"
* 2. "If yes/maybe, please briefly describe why:"
** (short answer box with no word or character limit)

The best paper committee should consider any paper that was marked "Yes" or "Maybe" by any reviewer (Note: PCs may choose whether or not consider papers that were labeled 'maybe' by a reviewer and not nominated by the AE/AC.), AE, AC, or SAC (Note: This requirement is included to clarify how this policy interacts with ACL Rolling Review.).

SACs may also choose a paper in their area to receive the “Area Chair’s Award”. This will encourage diversity in the papers that are highlighted. The Best Paper Committee will not be told which papers have received this award, to avoid biasing their choices.

Papers are not eligible for awards if their authors include Program Chairs. The PCs may also choose to specify that authors in other senior organisational roles are not eligible for awards.

Special category awards can either be handled in the same way, by editing the question above to include them, or through a separate process defined by the PCs.

=== Selection ===

(Note, this process was developed based on the assumption that the nomination process leads to 80-100 papers being considered for awards. If the number of nominated papers turns out to be much higher or lower then the selection process should be adapted as necessary.)

A best paper committee will be selected by the program chairs. The committee size should be large enough to keep the load to around 10-15 papers per member. The committee should be diverse in composition in terms of research areas and demographics.

The committee will follow a multistage process to determine the final awards. The committee will receive the final camera-ready version of the paper (or its anonymized version if possible), anonymized reviews, and associated supplementary materials.
# Papers are divided between the committee members based on research areas for a first pass in which each paper is read by at least 2 committee members. They independently place the papers into three groups: (1) consider for best paper, (2) consider for outstanding paper, (3) do not consider further.
# All committee members read the papers that were identified as under consideration for 'best paper'.
# The committee meets to make the final selections.

This proposal does not define a specific rubric. However, while reading and discussing papers, committee members should consider:

* Is each paper either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing? Note that papers do not need to demonstrate all of these properties; any property is sufficient.
* Does the paper present as its motivating use case an application with significant negative social impact? Even if the motivating use case is an application with neutral or positive social impact, are there obvious applications with significant negative social impact which are left unaddressed or insufficiently addressed by the paper? (In such cases, the paper should *not* be an award candidate.)
* Is the work presented in the paper reproducible? For example, is there sufficient information in the paper to repeat the experiments? If not, is the lack of reproducibility justified in the paper?
* Do the awards highlight a broad range of research types and strengths?
* Do the awards include types of research that can be conducted at small labs?
* Do the awards include papers that show excellence in potential positive social impact?

Special awards may be selected by the best paper committee or by separate committees.

== Announcement, Certificates, and Financial Awards ==

All awardees will be announced on the conference website or blog before the conference. All awardees will receive a certificate with the name of the conference, name of the award, title of the paper, and author names, signed by the Program Chair(s) and/or General Chair(s). Conferences may choose to have a financial component for any of the awards, which may be sponsored, and may be split between the authors as the authors choose.

== Documentation ==

The ACL Anthology will have an indication of which papers received awards (as it does now). Eventually, a page will be created that lists all papers that have received awards.

The ACL will track the research area and author demographics (gender and country of affiliation) of papers that are (a) nominated, and (b) receive awards. This information will be used to inform efforts to avoid bias and inequality in the selection process. Care should be taken to track them appropriately to avoid harm (e.g., by incorrectly assuming a demographic attribute). The ACL Equity Director will be responsible for maintaining these records.

== Notes on the development of this proposal ==

Committee that developed this policy:
* Bonnie Webber
* Christy Doran
* Huang Xuanjing
* Joel Tetreault
* Jonathan Kummerfeld [chair]
* Yusuke Miyao [chair]

Edits were made by Jonathan Kummerfeld based on discussion with the ACL Executive. Feedback was solicited from the community and informed further improvements.

=== Anonymity ===

We discussed requiring authors to be anonymous to avoid potential a source of bias, but realised it was (1) not easy to do with camera-ready versions of papers, and (2) would be difficult to maintain while also handling conflict-of-interests on the best paper committee (COIs will be more likely than in the past because more papers are being considered). Given those concerns, we have made it optional.

=== Choice of terms ===

The committee had mixed opinions on the term 'best'. On one hand, it is common/standard and expected, on the other hand, it implies a metric with a clear ranking of papers, which we do not have. After discussing a range of alternatives we returned to 'best' because it is such a well established term. Several options for the second category were discussed, including 'noteworthy', 'honourable mention', and 'outstanding'. The final proposal uses 'outstanding' as it
is a recognisable term.

=== Choice of numbers ===

* "Typically no more than 6" best papers. This value was chosen based on what we thought could be included in a single plenary session. However, the language is intentionally flexible.
* "1.5–2.5% of accepted papers" receive the outstanding paper award. This range was chosen to balance prestige (which favors a lower number) and the goal to recognize more work (which favors a higher number).
* For context, the graph below shows historical trends in awards at ACL going back to the very first year a best paper award was announced (note, these values include all award types together in the count for each year):

[[File: papers receiving awards at ACL.png|800px]]

=== Several ideas came up that are worth considering in the future: ===

* Dissertation Awards. These exist in other communities (e.g. AAAI) and are intended to recognise a body of work. We did not include them as they are outside of the conference awards process. They would need a separate process that could, for example, be conducted by each organisation / society separately. We also discussed awards for thesis proposals, which would be suitable for the Student Research Workshop.
* Journal Paper Awards. Other communities have these (e.g. ISCA for papers in CSL). We discussed including them here by saying CL and TACL papers presented at a conference are eligible for awards, but then the awards committee needs to compare quite different papers (e.g. a 30+ page journal article and a 4 page short conference paper). The approach used elsewhere is that each journal chooses a 'best paper', but that is then outside the scope of this proposal regarding conferences.
* Requirements for papers to be well-presented. We discussed the idea that papers that receive awards should be examples of well-presented ideas that students can look to for understanding how to write a good paper. On the other hand, it would seem unfair to not reward an innovative idea just because the author is inexperienced and did not present it perfectly. We tried to come up with language to balance these factors, but decided there was no simple solution, so this requirement was dropped.
* Advice/guidance for reviewers on when to select a paper for an award. This is a good idea that is outside the scope of this policy.

ACL Anonymity Policy

2024-01-12T13:41:12Z

Iryna Gurevych: better link to awards

ACL adopted the recommendations of [[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|this working group report]] on January 12, 2024. The new policy applies to subsequent submission deadlines. It will be reflected in the instructions for submission and reviewing. Please read the report for the policy details and their motivation.

Papers that were submitted to review processes with earlier deadlines are still governed by the old anonymity policy, since they use the old review procedure.

Both old and new policies are described at [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]]. The new policy will also [[ACL Conference Awards Policy#Additional_Award_Slots_for_Unpublicized_Work|affect awards]].

ACL Conference Awards Policy

2024-01-12T13:39:32Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Award Types and Criteria */ added subhead

This document lays out a standard protocol for awards at ACL conferences (Note that for conferences colocated with a non-ACL event there may need to be some adjustments depending on the policies of the other event. Also, this process was not developed for workshops or journals.). The goal of introducing the policy is to have a consistent approach that suits the scale of our conferences today. The policy is designed to highlight work that is interesting along a variety of axes in ways that encourage discussion. Recognizing valuable work in a consistent way also means the value is clearer (e.g., for hiring and tenure cases).

== Award Types and Criteria ==

=== Best Paper Award ===

We define "Best" as work that is particularly fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, and/or potentially field-changing.

* "Best Paper Award": Typically no more than 6 papers receive this award. These papers are presented in a plenary session at the conference. PCs should consider scheduling this plenary session early in the conference, to encourage discussion of the papers during the conference.
* "Outstanding Paper Award": 1.5–2.5% of accepted papers, selected as part of the same process. This allows for broader recognition of work that meets the criteria.
* "Area Chair's Award": Up to one paper per track. These are selected by the SACs for each track.
* Short and long papers are considered together for these awards.

=== Test of Time Award ===

See the policy at [[Test-of-Time Papers Award]].

=== Special Categories ===

Two special awards will recognise work with a particular focus as described below. Papers that receive an award in a special category are also eligible to receive a general award.
* Social Impact Award - For papers that have the potential for significant positive societal impact.
* Resource Award - For papers that announce, describe, and share a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new resource (e.g., a dataset or knowledge graph).

Program Committee Chairs may also choose to include awards for other categories. Examples
of additional special categories include:
* Software Award - For papers that describe and share (ideally via source code) a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new piece of software. Note that this is not the same as the Demonstration Paper Award since there could be papers outside of that track that meet this criterion.
* Demonstration Paper Award - For papers in the Demonstration Track.
* Theme Paper Award - For papers on the conference’s theme.
* Linguistic Insight Award - For papers that make a particularly significant contribution to our understanding of language.
* Low-Resource Paper Award - For papers that contribute to work on languages or domains with limited data.
* Interdisciplinary Research Award - For papers that contribute to NLP and another field in new and interesting ways.
* Reproduction Award - For papers that reproduce prior work in a particularly enlightening way, revealing additional features of the prior work.

=== Additional Award Slots for Unpublicized Work ===

In January 2024, the ACL Executive voted to adopt [[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|recommendations]] including the following:

<blockquote>Add new best and outstanding paper awards for submissions that remained anonymous to the public during the whole process, to ameliorate the “publicity deficit” for such submissions. (The precise eligibility criteria for these awards would be at the discretion of the awards committee. Of course, such submissions would remain eligible also for all other awards.)</blockquote>

== Selection Process ==

=== Nominations ===

In the review process, reviewers (Note: PCs may choose whether or not to include reviewers in the nomination process.), AEs, ACs, and SACs will be asked to answer the following questions:

* 1. "Could the camera-ready version of this paper merit consideration for an "outstanding paper" award (up to 2.5% of accepted papers will be recognized in this way)? Outstanding papers should be either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing. Awards will be decided based on the camera-ready version of the paper."
** "Yes"
** "Maybe"
** "No"
* 2. "If yes/maybe, please briefly describe why:"
** (short answer box with no word or character limit)

The best paper committee should consider any paper that was marked "Yes" or "Maybe" by any reviewer (Note: PCs may choose whether or not consider papers that were labeled 'maybe' by a reviewer and not nominated by the AE/AC.), AE, AC, or SAC (Note: This requirement is included to clarify how this policy interacts with ACL Rolling Review.).

SACs may also choose a paper in their area to receive the “Area Chair’s Award”. This will encourage diversity in the papers that are highlighted. The Best Paper Committee will not be told which papers have received this award, to avoid biasing their choices.

Papers are not eligible for awards if their authors include Program Chairs. The PCs may also choose to specify that authors in other senior organisational roles are not eligible for awards.

Special category awards can either be handled in the same way, by editing the question above to include them, or through a separate process defined by the PCs.

=== Selection ===

(Note, this process was developed based on the assumption that the nomination process leads to 80-100 papers being considered for awards. If the number of nominated papers turns out to be much higher or lower then the selection process should be adapted as necessary.)

A best paper committee will be selected by the program chairs. The committee size should be large enough to keep the load to around 10-15 papers per member. The committee should be diverse in composition in terms of research areas and demographics.

The committee will follow a multistage process to determine the final awards. The committee will receive the final camera-ready version of the paper (or its anonymized version if possible), anonymized reviews, and associated supplementary materials.
# Papers are divided between the committee members based on research areas for a first pass in which each paper is read by at least 2 committee members. They independently place the papers into three groups: (1) consider for best paper, (2) consider for outstanding paper, (3) do not consider further.
# All committee members read the papers that were identified as under consideration for 'best paper'.
# The committee meets to make the final selections.

This proposal does not define a specific rubric. However, while reading and discussing papers, committee members should consider:

* Is each paper either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing? Note that papers do not need to demonstrate all of these properties; any property is sufficient.
* Does the paper present as its motivating use case an application with significant negative social impact? Even if the motivating use case is an application with neutral or positive social impact, are there obvious applications with significant negative social impact which are left unaddressed or insufficiently addressed by the paper? (In such cases, the paper should *not* be an award candidate.)
* Is the work presented in the paper reproducible? For example, is there sufficient information in the paper to repeat the experiments? If not, is the lack of reproducibility justified in the paper?
* Do the awards highlight a broad range of research types and strengths?
* Do the awards include types of research that can be conducted at small labs?
* Do the awards include papers that show excellence in potential positive social impact?

Special awards may be selected by the best paper committee or by separate committees.

== Announcement, Certificates, and Financial Awards ==

All awardees will be announced on the conference website or blog before the conference. All awardees will receive a certificate with the name of the conference, name of the award, title of the paper, and author names, signed by the Program Chair(s) and/or General Chair(s). Conferences may choose to have a financial component for any of the awards, which may be sponsored, and may be split between the authors as the authors choose.

== Documentation ==

The ACL Anthology will have an indication of which papers received awards (as it does now). Eventually, a page will be created that lists all papers that have received awards.

The ACL will track the research area and author demographics (gender and country of affiliation) of papers that are (a) nominated, and (b) receive awards. This information will be used to inform efforts to avoid bias and inequality in the selection process. Care should be taken to track them appropriately to avoid harm (e.g., by incorrectly assuming a demographic attribute). The ACL Equity Director will be responsible for maintaining these records.

== Notes on the development of this proposal ==

Committee that developed this policy:
* Bonnie Webber
* Christy Doran
* Huang Xuanjing
* Joel Tetreault
* Jonathan Kummerfeld [chair]
* Yusuke Miyao [chair]

Edits were made by Jonathan Kummerfeld based on discussion with the ACL Executive. Feedback was solicited from the community and informed further improvements.

=== Anonymity ===

We discussed requiring authors to be anonymous to avoid potential a source of bias, but realised it was (1) not easy to do with camera-ready versions of papers, and (2) would be difficult to maintain while also handling conflict-of-interests on the best paper committee (COIs will be more likely than in the past because more papers are being considered). Given those concerns, we have made it optional.

=== Choice of terms ===

The committee had mixed opinions on the term 'best'. On one hand, it is common/standard and expected, on the other hand, it implies a metric with a clear ranking of papers, which we do not have. After discussing a range of alternatives we returned to 'best' because it is such a well established term. Several options for the second category were discussed, including 'noteworthy', 'honourable mention', and 'outstanding'. The final proposal uses 'outstanding' as it
is a recognisable term.

=== Choice of numbers ===

* "Typically no more than 6" best papers. This value was chosen based on what we thought could be included in a single plenary session. However, the language is intentionally flexible.
* "1.5–2.5% of accepted papers" receive the outstanding paper award. This range was chosen to balance prestige (which favors a lower number) and the goal to recognize more work (which favors a higher number).
* For context, the graph below shows historical trends in awards at ACL going back to the very first year a best paper award was announced (note, these values include all award types together in the count for each year):

[[File: papers receiving awards at ACL.png|800px]]

=== Several ideas came up that are worth considering in the future: ===

* Dissertation Awards. These exist in other communities (e.g. AAAI) and are intended to recognise a body of work. We did not include them as they are outside of the conference awards process. They would need a separate process that could, for example, be conducted by each organisation / society separately. We also discussed awards for thesis proposals, which would be suitable for the Student Research Workshop.
* Journal Paper Awards. Other communities have these (e.g. ISCA for papers in CSL). We discussed including them here by saying CL and TACL papers presented at a conference are eligible for awards, but then the awards committee needs to compare quite different papers (e.g. a 30+ page journal article and a 4 page short conference paper). The approach used elsewhere is that each journal chooses a 'best paper', but that is then outside the scope of this proposal regarding conferences.
* Requirements for papers to be well-presented. We discussed the idea that papers that receive awards should be examples of well-presented ideas that students can look to for understanding how to write a good paper. On the other hand, it would seem unfair to not reward an innovative idea just because the author is inexperienced and did not present it perfectly. We tried to come up with language to balance these factors, but decided there was no simple solution, so this requirement was dropped.
* Advice/guidance for reviewers on when to select a paper for an award. This is a good idea that is outside the scope of this policy.

ACL Conference Awards Policy

2024-01-12T13:38:30Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Special Categories */ deleted stray characters

This document lays out a standard protocol for awards at ACL conferences (Note that for conferences colocated with a non-ACL event there may need to be some adjustments depending on the policies of the other event. Also, this process was not developed for workshops or journals.). The goal of introducing the policy is to have a consistent approach that suits the scale of our conferences today. The policy is designed to highlight work that is interesting along a variety of axes in ways that encourage discussion. Recognizing valuable work in a consistent way also means the value is clearer (e.g., for hiring and tenure cases).

== Award Types and Criteria ==

=== Best Paper Award ===

We define "Best" as work that is particularly fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, and/or potentially field-changing.

* "Best Paper Award": Typically no more than 6 papers receive this award. These papers are presented in a plenary session at the conference. PCs should consider scheduling this plenary session early in the conference, to encourage discussion of the papers during the conference.
* "Outstanding Paper Award": 1.5–2.5% of accepted papers, selected as part of the same process. This allows for broader recognition of work that meets the criteria.
* "Area Chair's Award": Up to one paper per track. These are selected by the SACs for each track.
* Short and long papers are considered together for these awards.

=== Test of Time Award ===

See the policy at [[Test-of-Time Papers Award]].

=== Special Categories ===

Two special awards will recognise work with a particular focus as described below. Papers that receive an award in a special category are also eligible to receive a general award.
* Social Impact Award - For papers that have the potential for significant positive societal impact.
* Resource Award - For papers that announce, describe, and share a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new resource (e.g., a dataset or knowledge graph).

Program Committee Chairs may also choose to include awards for other categories. Examples
of additional special categories include:
* Software Award - For papers that describe and share (ideally via source code) a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new piece of software. Note that this is not the same as the Demonstration Paper Award since there could be papers outside of that track that meet this criterion.
* Demonstration Paper Award - For papers in the Demonstration Track.
* Theme Paper Award - For papers on the conference’s theme.
* Linguistic Insight Award - For papers that make a particularly significant contribution to our understanding of language.
* Low-Resource Paper Award - For papers that contribute to work on languages or domains with limited data.
* Interdisciplinary Research Award - For papers that contribute to NLP and another field in new and interesting ways.
* Reproduction Award - For papers that reproduce prior work in a particularly enlightening way, revealing additional features of the prior work.

In January 2024, the ACL Executive voted to adopt [[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|recommendations]] including the following:

<blockquote>Add new best and outstanding paper awards for submissions that remained anonymous to the public during the whole process, to ameliorate the “publicity deficit” for such submissions. (The precise eligibility criteria for these awards would be at the discretion of the awards committee. Of course, such submissions would remain eligible also for all other awards.)</blockquote>

== Selection Process ==

=== Nominations ===

In the review process, reviewers (Note: PCs may choose whether or not to include reviewers in the nomination process.), AEs, ACs, and SACs will be asked to answer the following questions:

* 1. "Could the camera-ready version of this paper merit consideration for an "outstanding paper" award (up to 2.5% of accepted papers will be recognized in this way)? Outstanding papers should be either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing. Awards will be decided based on the camera-ready version of the paper."
** "Yes"
** "Maybe"
** "No"
* 2. "If yes/maybe, please briefly describe why:"
** (short answer box with no word or character limit)

The best paper committee should consider any paper that was marked "Yes" or "Maybe" by any reviewer (Note: PCs may choose whether or not consider papers that were labeled 'maybe' by a reviewer and not nominated by the AE/AC.), AE, AC, or SAC (Note: This requirement is included to clarify how this policy interacts with ACL Rolling Review.).

SACs may also choose a paper in their area to receive the “Area Chair’s Award”. This will encourage diversity in the papers that are highlighted. The Best Paper Committee will not be told which papers have received this award, to avoid biasing their choices.

Papers are not eligible for awards if their authors include Program Chairs. The PCs may also choose to specify that authors in other senior organisational roles are not eligible for awards.

Special category awards can either be handled in the same way, by editing the question above to include them, or through a separate process defined by the PCs.

=== Selection ===

(Note, this process was developed based on the assumption that the nomination process leads to 80-100 papers being considered for awards. If the number of nominated papers turns out to be much higher or lower then the selection process should be adapted as necessary.)

A best paper committee will be selected by the program chairs. The committee size should be large enough to keep the load to around 10-15 papers per member. The committee should be diverse in composition in terms of research areas and demographics.

The committee will follow a multistage process to determine the final awards. The committee will receive the final camera-ready version of the paper (or its anonymized version if possible), anonymized reviews, and associated supplementary materials.
# Papers are divided between the committee members based on research areas for a first pass in which each paper is read by at least 2 committee members. They independently place the papers into three groups: (1) consider for best paper, (2) consider for outstanding paper, (3) do not consider further.
# All committee members read the papers that were identified as under consideration for 'best paper'.
# The committee meets to make the final selections.

This proposal does not define a specific rubric. However, while reading and discussing papers, committee members should consider:

* Is each paper either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing? Note that papers do not need to demonstrate all of these properties; any property is sufficient.
* Does the paper present as its motivating use case an application with significant negative social impact? Even if the motivating use case is an application with neutral or positive social impact, are there obvious applications with significant negative social impact which are left unaddressed or insufficiently addressed by the paper? (In such cases, the paper should *not* be an award candidate.)
* Is the work presented in the paper reproducible? For example, is there sufficient information in the paper to repeat the experiments? If not, is the lack of reproducibility justified in the paper?
* Do the awards highlight a broad range of research types and strengths?
* Do the awards include types of research that can be conducted at small labs?
* Do the awards include papers that show excellence in potential positive social impact?

Special awards may be selected by the best paper committee or by separate committees.

== Announcement, Certificates, and Financial Awards ==

All awardees will be announced on the conference website or blog before the conference. All awardees will receive a certificate with the name of the conference, name of the award, title of the paper, and author names, signed by the Program Chair(s) and/or General Chair(s). Conferences may choose to have a financial component for any of the awards, which may be sponsored, and may be split between the authors as the authors choose.

== Documentation ==

The ACL Anthology will have an indication of which papers received awards (as it does now). Eventually, a page will be created that lists all papers that have received awards.

The ACL will track the research area and author demographics (gender and country of affiliation) of papers that are (a) nominated, and (b) receive awards. This information will be used to inform efforts to avoid bias and inequality in the selection process. Care should be taken to track them appropriately to avoid harm (e.g., by incorrectly assuming a demographic attribute). The ACL Equity Director will be responsible for maintaining these records.

== Notes on the development of this proposal ==

Committee that developed this policy:
* Bonnie Webber
* Christy Doran
* Huang Xuanjing
* Joel Tetreault
* Jonathan Kummerfeld [chair]
* Yusuke Miyao [chair]

Edits were made by Jonathan Kummerfeld based on discussion with the ACL Executive. Feedback was solicited from the community and informed further improvements.

=== Anonymity ===

We discussed requiring authors to be anonymous to avoid potential a source of bias, but realised it was (1) not easy to do with camera-ready versions of papers, and (2) would be difficult to maintain while also handling conflict-of-interests on the best paper committee (COIs will be more likely than in the past because more papers are being considered). Given those concerns, we have made it optional.

=== Choice of terms ===

The committee had mixed opinions on the term 'best'. On one hand, it is common/standard and expected, on the other hand, it implies a metric with a clear ranking of papers, which we do not have. After discussing a range of alternatives we returned to 'best' because it is such a well established term. Several options for the second category were discussed, including 'noteworthy', 'honourable mention', and 'outstanding'. The final proposal uses 'outstanding' as it
is a recognisable term.

=== Choice of numbers ===

* "Typically no more than 6" best papers. This value was chosen based on what we thought could be included in a single plenary session. However, the language is intentionally flexible.
* "1.5–2.5% of accepted papers" receive the outstanding paper award. This range was chosen to balance prestige (which favors a lower number) and the goal to recognize more work (which favors a higher number).
* For context, the graph below shows historical trends in awards at ACL going back to the very first year a best paper award was announced (note, these values include all award types together in the count for each year):

[[File: papers receiving awards at ACL.png|800px]]

=== Several ideas came up that are worth considering in the future: ===

* Dissertation Awards. These exist in other communities (e.g. AAAI) and are intended to recognise a body of work. We did not include them as they are outside of the conference awards process. They would need a separate process that could, for example, be conducted by each organisation / society separately. We also discussed awards for thesis proposals, which would be suitable for the Student Research Workshop.
* Journal Paper Awards. Other communities have these (e.g. ISCA for papers in CSL). We discussed including them here by saying CL and TACL papers presented at a conference are eligible for awards, but then the awards committee needs to compare quite different papers (e.g. a 30+ page journal article and a 4 page short conference paper). The approach used elsewhere is that each journal chooses a 'best paper', but that is then outside the scope of this proposal regarding conferences.
* Requirements for papers to be well-presented. We discussed the idea that papers that receive awards should be examples of well-presented ideas that students can look to for understanding how to write a good paper. On the other hand, it would seem unfair to not reward an innovative idea just because the author is inexperienced and did not present it perfectly. We tried to come up with language to balance these factors, but decided there was no simple solution, so this requirement was dropped.
* Advice/guidance for reviewers on when to select a paper for an award. This is a good idea that is outside the scope of this policy.

ACL Conference Awards Policy

2024-01-12T13:38:03Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Award Types and Criteria */ deleted stray characters

This document lays out a standard protocol for awards at ACL conferences (Note that for conferences colocated with a non-ACL event there may need to be some adjustments depending on the policies of the other event. Also, this process was not developed for workshops or journals.). The goal of introducing the policy is to have a consistent approach that suits the scale of our conferences today. The policy is designed to highlight work that is interesting along a variety of axes in ways that encourage discussion. Recognizing valuable work in a consistent way also means the value is clearer (e.g., for hiring and tenure cases).

== Award Types and Criteria ==

=== Best Paper Award ===

We define "Best" as work that is particularly fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, and/or potentially field-changing.

* "Best Paper Award": Typically no more than 6 papers receive this award. These papers are presented in a plenary session at the conference. PCs should consider scheduling this plenary session early in the conference, to encourage discussion of the papers during the conference.
* "Outstanding Paper Award": 1.5–2.5% of accepted papers, selected as part of the same process. This allows for broader recognition of work that meets the criteria.
* "Area Chair's Award": Up to one paper per track. These are selected by the SACs for each track.
* Short and long papers are considered together for these awards.

=== Test of Time Award ===

See the policy at [[Test-of-Time Papers Award]].

=== Special Categories ===

Two special awards will recognise work with a particular focus as described below. Papers that receive an award in a special category are also eligible to receive a general award.
* Social Impact Award - For papers that have the potential for significant positive societal impact.
* Resource Award - For papers that announce, describe, and share a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new resource (e.g., a dataset or knowledge graph).

Program Committee Chairs may also choose to include awards for other categories. Examples
of additional special categories include:
* Software Award - For papers that describe and share (ideally via source code) a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new piece of software. Note that this is not the same as the Demonstration Paper Award since there could be papers outside of that track that meet this criterion.
* Demonstration Paper Award - For papers in the Demonstration Track.
* Theme Paper Award - For papers on the conference’s theme.
* Linguistic Insight Award - For papers that make a particularly significant contribution to our understanding of language.
* Low-Resource Paper Award - For papers that contribute to work on languages or domains with limited data.
* Interdisciplinary Research Award - For papers that contribute to NLP and another field in new and interesting ways.
* Reproduction Award -{{Quote|text= For papers that reproduce prior work in a particularly enlightening way, revealing additional features of the prior work.

In January 2024, the ACL Executive voted to adopt [[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|recommendations]] including the following:

<blockquote>Add new best and outstanding paper awards for submissions that remained anonymous to the public during the whole process, to ameliorate the “publicity deficit” for such submissions. (The precise eligibility criteria for these awards would be at the discretion of the awards committee. Of course, such submissions would remain eligible also for all other awards.)</blockquote>

== Selection Process ==

=== Nominations ===

In the review process, reviewers (Note: PCs may choose whether or not to include reviewers in the nomination process.), AEs, ACs, and SACs will be asked to answer the following questions:

* 1. "Could the camera-ready version of this paper merit consideration for an "outstanding paper" award (up to 2.5% of accepted papers will be recognized in this way)? Outstanding papers should be either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing. Awards will be decided based on the camera-ready version of the paper."
** "Yes"
** "Maybe"
** "No"
* 2. "If yes/maybe, please briefly describe why:"
** (short answer box with no word or character limit)

The best paper committee should consider any paper that was marked "Yes" or "Maybe" by any reviewer (Note: PCs may choose whether or not consider papers that were labeled 'maybe' by a reviewer and not nominated by the AE/AC.), AE, AC, or SAC (Note: This requirement is included to clarify how this policy interacts with ACL Rolling Review.).

SACs may also choose a paper in their area to receive the “Area Chair’s Award”. This will encourage diversity in the papers that are highlighted. The Best Paper Committee will not be told which papers have received this award, to avoid biasing their choices.

Papers are not eligible for awards if their authors include Program Chairs. The PCs may also choose to specify that authors in other senior organisational roles are not eligible for awards.

Special category awards can either be handled in the same way, by editing the question above to include them, or through a separate process defined by the PCs.

=== Selection ===

(Note, this process was developed based on the assumption that the nomination process leads to 80-100 papers being considered for awards. If the number of nominated papers turns out to be much higher or lower then the selection process should be adapted as necessary.)

A best paper committee will be selected by the program chairs. The committee size should be large enough to keep the load to around 10-15 papers per member. The committee should be diverse in composition in terms of research areas and demographics.

The committee will follow a multistage process to determine the final awards. The committee will receive the final camera-ready version of the paper (or its anonymized version if possible), anonymized reviews, and associated supplementary materials.
# Papers are divided between the committee members based on research areas for a first pass in which each paper is read by at least 2 committee members. They independently place the papers into three groups: (1) consider for best paper, (2) consider for outstanding paper, (3) do not consider further.
# All committee members read the papers that were identified as under consideration for 'best paper'.
# The committee meets to make the final selections.

This proposal does not define a specific rubric. However, while reading and discussing papers, committee members should consider:

* Is each paper either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing? Note that papers do not need to demonstrate all of these properties; any property is sufficient.
* Does the paper present as its motivating use case an application with significant negative social impact? Even if the motivating use case is an application with neutral or positive social impact, are there obvious applications with significant negative social impact which are left unaddressed or insufficiently addressed by the paper? (In such cases, the paper should *not* be an award candidate.)
* Is the work presented in the paper reproducible? For example, is there sufficient information in the paper to repeat the experiments? If not, is the lack of reproducibility justified in the paper?
* Do the awards highlight a broad range of research types and strengths?
* Do the awards include types of research that can be conducted at small labs?
* Do the awards include papers that show excellence in potential positive social impact?

Special awards may be selected by the best paper committee or by separate committees.

== Announcement, Certificates, and Financial Awards ==

All awardees will be announced on the conference website or blog before the conference. All awardees will receive a certificate with the name of the conference, name of the award, title of the paper, and author names, signed by the Program Chair(s) and/or General Chair(s). Conferences may choose to have a financial component for any of the awards, which may be sponsored, and may be split between the authors as the authors choose.

== Documentation ==

The ACL Anthology will have an indication of which papers received awards (as it does now). Eventually, a page will be created that lists all papers that have received awards.

The ACL will track the research area and author demographics (gender and country of affiliation) of papers that are (a) nominated, and (b) receive awards. This information will be used to inform efforts to avoid bias and inequality in the selection process. Care should be taken to track them appropriately to avoid harm (e.g., by incorrectly assuming a demographic attribute). The ACL Equity Director will be responsible for maintaining these records.

== Notes on the development of this proposal ==

Committee that developed this policy:
* Bonnie Webber
* Christy Doran
* Huang Xuanjing
* Joel Tetreault
* Jonathan Kummerfeld [chair]
* Yusuke Miyao [chair]

Edits were made by Jonathan Kummerfeld based on discussion with the ACL Executive. Feedback was solicited from the community and informed further improvements.

=== Anonymity ===

We discussed requiring authors to be anonymous to avoid potential a source of bias, but realised it was (1) not easy to do with camera-ready versions of papers, and (2) would be difficult to maintain while also handling conflict-of-interests on the best paper committee (COIs will be more likely than in the past because more papers are being considered). Given those concerns, we have made it optional.

=== Choice of terms ===

The committee had mixed opinions on the term 'best'. On one hand, it is common/standard and expected, on the other hand, it implies a metric with a clear ranking of papers, which we do not have. After discussing a range of alternatives we returned to 'best' because it is such a well established term. Several options for the second category were discussed, including 'noteworthy', 'honourable mention', and 'outstanding'. The final proposal uses 'outstanding' as it
is a recognisable term.

=== Choice of numbers ===

* "Typically no more than 6" best papers. This value was chosen based on what we thought could be included in a single plenary session. However, the language is intentionally flexible.
* "1.5–2.5% of accepted papers" receive the outstanding paper award. This range was chosen to balance prestige (which favors a lower number) and the goal to recognize more work (which favors a higher number).
* For context, the graph below shows historical trends in awards at ACL going back to the very first year a best paper award was announced (note, these values include all award types together in the count for each year):

[[File: papers receiving awards at ACL.png|800px]]

=== Several ideas came up that are worth considering in the future: ===

* Dissertation Awards. These exist in other communities (e.g. AAAI) and are intended to recognise a body of work. We did not include them as they are outside of the conference awards process. They would need a separate process that could, for example, be conducted by each organisation / society separately. We also discussed awards for thesis proposals, which would be suitable for the Student Research Workshop.
* Journal Paper Awards. Other communities have these (e.g. ISCA for papers in CSL). We discussed including them here by saying CL and TACL papers presented at a conference are eligible for awards, but then the awards committee needs to compare quite different papers (e.g. a 30+ page journal article and a 4 page short conference paper). The approach used elsewhere is that each journal chooses a 'best paper', but that is then outside the scope of this proposal regarding conferences.
* Requirements for papers to be well-presented. We discussed the idea that papers that receive awards should be examples of well-presented ideas that students can look to for understanding how to write a good paper. On the other hand, it would seem unfair to not reward an innovative idea just because the author is inexperienced and did not present it perfectly. We tried to come up with language to balance these factors, but decided there was no simple solution, so this requirement was dropped.
* Advice/guidance for reviewers on when to select a paper for an award. This is a good idea that is outside the scope of this policy.

ACL Conference Awards Policy

2024-01-12T13:36:45Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Award Types and Criteria */ new publicity-deficit awards

This document lays out a standard protocol for awards at ACL conferences (Note that for conferences colocated with a non-ACL event there may need to be some adjustments depending on the policies of the other event. Also, this process was not developed for workshops or journals.). The goal of introducing the policy is to have a consistent approach that suits the scale of our conferences today. The policy is designed to highlight work that is interesting along a variety of axes in ways that encourage discussion. Recognizing valuable work in a consistent way also means the value is clearer (e.g., for hiring and tenure cases).

== Award Types and Criteria ==

=== Best Paper Award ===

We define "Best" as work that is particularly fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, and/or potentially field-changing.

* "Best Paper Award": Typically no more than 6 papers receive this award. These papers are presented in a plenary session at the conference. PCs should consider scheduling this plenary session early in the conference, to encourage discussion of the papers during the conference.
* "Outstanding Paper Award": 1.5–2.5% of accepted papers, selected as part of the same process. This allows for broader recognition of work that meets the criteria.
* "Area Chair's Award": Up to one paper per track. These are selected by the SACs for each track.
* Short and long papers are considered together for these awards.

=== Test of Time Award ===

See the policy at [[Test-of-Time Papers Award]].

=== Special Categories ===

Two special awards will recognise work with a particular focus as described below. Papers that receive an award in a special category are also eligible to receive a general award.
* Social Impact Award - For papers that have the potential for significant positive societal impact.
* Resource Award - For papers that announce, describe, and share a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new resource (e.g., a dataset or knowledge graph).

Program Committee Chairs may also choose to include awards for other categories. Examples
of additional special categories include:
* Software Award - For papers that describe and share (ideally via source code) a fascinating, valuable, or potentially field-changing new piece of software. Note that this is not the same as the Demonstration Paper Award since there could be papers outside of that track that meet this criterion.
* Demonstration Paper Award - For papers in th{{Quote|text=e Demonstration Track.
* Theme Paper Award - For papers on the conference’s theme.
* Linguistic Insight Award - For papers that make a particularly significant contribution to our understanding of language.
* Low-Resource Paper Award - For papers that contribute to work on languages or domains with limited data.
* Interdisciplinary Research Award - For papers that contribute to NLP and another field in new and interesting ways.
* Reproduction Award -{{Quote|text= For papers that reproduce prior work in a particularly enlightening way, revealing additional features of the prior work.

In January 2024, the ACL Executive voted to adopt [[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|recommendations]] including the following:

<blockquote>Add new best and outstanding paper awards for submissions that remained anonymous to the public during the whole process, to ameliorate the “publicity deficit” for such submissions. (The precise eligibility criteria for these awards would be at the discretion of the awards committee. Of course, such submissions would remain eligible also for all other awards.)</blockquote>

== Selection Process ==

=== Nominations ===

In the review process, reviewers (Note: PCs may choose whether or not to include reviewers in the nomination process.), AEs, ACs, and SACs will be asked to answer the following questions:

* 1. "Could the camera-ready version of this paper merit consideration for an "outstanding paper" award (up to 2.5% of accepted papers will be recognized in this way)? Outstanding papers should be either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing. Awards will be decided based on the camera-ready version of the paper."
** "Yes"
** "Maybe"
** "No"
* 2. "If yes/maybe, please briefly describe why:"
** (short answer box with no word or character limit)

The best paper committee should consider any paper that was marked "Yes" or "Maybe" by any reviewer (Note: PCs may choose whether or not consider papers that were labeled 'maybe' by a reviewer and not nominated by the AE/AC.), AE, AC, or SAC (Note: This requirement is included to clarify how this policy interacts with ACL Rolling Review.).

SACs may also choose a paper in their area to receive the “Area Chair’s Award”. This will encourage diversity in the papers that are highlighted. The Best Paper Committee will not be told which papers have received this award, to avoid biasing their choices.

Papers are not eligible for awards if their authors include Program Chairs. The PCs may also choose to specify that authors in other senior organisational roles are not eligible for awards.

Special category awards can either be handled in the same way, by editing the question above to include them, or through a separate process defined by the PCs.

=== Selection ===

(Note, this process was developed based on the assumption that the nomination process leads to 80-100 papers being considered for awards. If the number of nominated papers turns out to be much higher or lower then the selection process should be adapted as necessary.)

A best paper committee will be selected by the program chairs. The committee size should be large enough to keep the load to around 10-15 papers per member. The committee should be diverse in composition in terms of research areas and demographics.

The committee will follow a multistage process to determine the final awards. The committee will receive the final camera-ready version of the paper (or its anonymized version if possible), anonymized reviews, and associated supplementary materials.
# Papers are divided between the committee members based on research areas for a first pass in which each paper is read by at least 2 committee members. They independently place the papers into three groups: (1) consider for best paper, (2) consider for outstanding paper, (3) do not consider further.
# All committee members read the papers that were identified as under consideration for 'best paper'.
# The committee meets to make the final selections.

This proposal does not define a specific rubric. However, while reading and discussing papers, committee members should consider:

* Is each paper either fascinating, controversial, surprising, impressive, or potentially field-changing? Note that papers do not need to demonstrate all of these properties; any property is sufficient.
* Does the paper present as its motivating use case an application with significant negative social impact? Even if the motivating use case is an application with neutral or positive social impact, are there obvious applications with significant negative social impact which are left unaddressed or insufficiently addressed by the paper? (In such cases, the paper should *not* be an award candidate.)
* Is the work presented in the paper reproducible? For example, is there sufficient information in the paper to repeat the experiments? If not, is the lack of reproducibility justified in the paper?
* Do the awards highlight a broad range of research types and strengths?
* Do the awards include types of research that can be conducted at small labs?
* Do the awards include papers that show excellence in potential positive social impact?

Special awards may be selected by the best paper committee or by separate committees.

== Announcement, Certificates, and Financial Awards ==

All awardees will be announced on the conference website or blog before the conference. All awardees will receive a certificate with the name of the conference, name of the award, title of the paper, and author names, signed by the Program Chair(s) and/or General Chair(s). Conferences may choose to have a financial component for any of the awards, which may be sponsored, and may be split between the authors as the authors choose.

== Documentation ==

The ACL Anthology will have an indication of which papers received awards (as it does now). Eventually, a page will be created that lists all papers that have received awards.

The ACL will track the research area and author demographics (gender and country of affiliation) of papers that are (a) nominated, and (b) receive awards. This information will be used to inform efforts to avoid bias and inequality in the selection process. Care should be taken to track them appropriately to avoid harm (e.g., by incorrectly assuming a demographic attribute). The ACL Equity Director will be responsible for maintaining these records.

== Notes on the development of this proposal ==

Committee that developed this policy:
* Bonnie Webber
* Christy Doran
* Huang Xuanjing
* Joel Tetreault
* Jonathan Kummerfeld [chair]
* Yusuke Miyao [chair]

Edits were made by Jonathan Kummerfeld based on discussion with the ACL Executive. Feedback was solicited from the community and informed further improvements.

=== Anonymity ===

We discussed requiring authors to be anonymous to avoid potential a source of bias, but realised it was (1) not easy to do with camera-ready versions of papers, and (2) would be difficult to maintain while also handling conflict-of-interests on the best paper committee (COIs will be more likely than in the past because more papers are being considered). Given those concerns, we have made it optional.

=== Choice of terms ===

The committee had mixed opinions on the term 'best'. On one hand, it is common/standard and expected, on the other hand, it implies a metric with a clear ranking of papers, which we do not have. After discussing a range of alternatives we returned to 'best' because it is such a well established term. Several options for the second category were discussed, including 'noteworthy', 'honourable mention', and 'outstanding'. The final proposal uses 'outstanding' as it
is a recognisable term.

=== Choice of numbers ===

* "Typically no more than 6" best papers. This value was chosen based on what we thought could be included in a single plenary session. However, the language is intentionally flexible.
* "1.5–2.5% of accepted papers" receive the outstanding paper award. This range was chosen to balance prestige (which favors a lower number) and the goal to recognize more work (which favors a higher number).
* For context, the graph below shows historical trends in awards at ACL going back to the very first year a best paper award was announced (note, these values include all award types together in the count for each year):

[[File: papers receiving awards at ACL.png|800px]]

=== Several ideas came up that are worth considering in the future: ===

* Dissertation Awards. These exist in other communities (e.g. AAAI) and are intended to recognise a body of work. We did not include them as they are outside of the conference awards process. They would need a separate process that could, for example, be conducted by each organisation / society separately. We also discussed awards for thesis proposals, which would be suitable for the Student Research Workshop.
* Journal Paper Awards. Other communities have these (e.g. ISCA for papers in CSL). We discussed including them here by saying CL and TACL papers presented at a conference are eligible for awards, but then the awards committee needs to compare quite different papers (e.g. a 30+ page journal article and a 4 page short conference paper). The approach used elsewhere is that each journal chooses a 'best paper', but that is then outside the scope of this proposal regarding conferences.
* Requirements for papers to be well-presented. We discussed the idea that papers that receive awards should be examples of well-presented ideas that students can look to for understanding how to write a good paper. On the other hand, it would seem unfair to not reward an innovative idea just because the author is inexperienced and did not present it perfectly. We tried to come up with language to balance these factors, but decided there was no simple solution, so this requirement was dropped.
* Advice/guidance for reviewers on when to select a paper for an award. This is a good idea that is outside the scope of this policy.

ACL Anonymity Policy

2024-01-12T13:31:16Z

Iryna Gurevych: mentioned awards

ACL Reviewer Guidelines

2024-01-12T13:24:34Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Preserving Double Blind Review */ match wording on parent page

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding author guidelines, see: [[ACL Author Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

* Reviewing may involve an online search for related work. However, do not set out to uncover the identity of the authors and try not to let any suspicions regarding author identity affect your judgement. To reduce the risk of bias, it is a good idea to read the paper and draft an initial review before you carry out any online searches that risk discovering authorship. You should be especially careful if an area chair has informed you that a non-anonymized version of the paper is available online.
* If you do become aware of the authors' identity (by whatever means), let the area chairs (but not your fellow reviewers) know.
* If you come across a preprint or paper that has a substantial text overlap with the submission, report this to the area chairs even if the existence of a preprint has been declared, since you do not know whether the authors of the discovered paper are the authors of the submission under review, and so the possibility of plagiarism needs to be considered.
* After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask reviewers to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper, and will take this information into account when assigning and using reviews. This new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

== Citation and Comparison ==

* Evaluate papers based on your knowledge of the subject, regardless of where you gained this knowledge. If you are aware of relevant publicly available research that has not been cited in the paper you are reviewing, you should bring it to the attention of the authors, irrespective of whether it is described in a preprint or a refereed publication. However, if the work appears only in a preprint, especially one that is recent and/or not widely cited, you should in general give authors the benefit of the doubt and not penalize them for the missing citation.
* Papers should include appropriate discussion of related work, potentially including both preprints and refereed publications. However, it is not reasonable to expect a time-consuming empirical comparison with work that has appeared ''less than 3 months before the submission deadline''. In this situation, the two papers are considered to be ''contemporaneous''. Contemporaneous papers may affect your perspective on the ''quality'' of a submission, but should be disregarded when evaluating the ''novelty'' of the submission, unless there is evidence that they have influenced the submission.

ACL Policies

2024-01-12T13:14:24Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Policies */

== Policies ==

*[[ACL Conference Awards Policy]]

*[[ACL COVID Policy]]

*[[ACL Privacy Policy]]

*[[Anti-Harassment Policy]]

*[[ACL Whistleblower Protection Policy]]

*[[ACL Conflict-of-interest policy]]

*[[ACL Conference Conflict-of-interest policy]]

*[[ACL Conference Consistency policy]]

*[[ACL Document Retention and Destruction Policy]]

*[[ACL Policy on Political Statements and Actions]]

*[[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]]

*[[Policy on Memorial Services]]

*[[ACL Sponsorship COI Policy]]

*[[CL Journal COI Policy]]

*[[Media:ACL_Efficient_NLP_Policy.pdf|ACL Efficient NLP Policy]]

*[[ACL Name Change Policy]]

== Proposals ==

*[[Short-Term Reform Proposals for ACL Reviewing]]

*[[ACL Rolling Review Proposal]]

*[[Review Data Collection at *ACL]]

*[[Formation of the ACL Ethics Committee]]

== Awards ==

*[[Test-of-Time Papers Award]]

*[[Lifetime Achievement Award]]

*[[Dragomir Radev Distinguished Service Award]]

== Procedures ==

*[[Test-of-Time Papers Process]]

*[[Procedure for composing the new Nominating Committee]]

*[[Fellows Program]]

*[[Process for Ad Hoc ACL Leadership Roles]]

== Guidelines ==

*[[ACL Author Guidelines]]

*[[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

ACL Author Guidelines

2024-01-12T13:10:54Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Preserving Double Blind Review */ submissions must still be anonymized

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding reviewer guidelines, see: [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. These restrictions do not apply to papers submitted later, although submissions must still be anonymized and authors are still cautioned against extensive advertising. This new policy is explained [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the ''anonymity period'', which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

*You ''may not'' make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) ''during'' the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

*If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you ''may'' submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

*Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you 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.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:
** You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you 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 your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

ACL Policies for Review and Citation

2024-01-12T13:09:54Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Submission */ elim dup text

The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. The policies are in effect for all *ACL conferences starting with NAACL 2018 and for TACL from the submission deadline of January 1, 2018. We recommend conferences and workshops that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.
* For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
** [[ACL Author Guidelines]]
** [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

== Submission ==

<nowiki>*</nowiki>ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized.

This rest of this section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. These restrictions do not apply to papers submitted later, although authors are still cautioned against extensive advertising. This new policy is explained [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

A submission will ''not'' be considered anonymized if the authors post (or update) a non-anonymized preprint version within an ''anonymity period'' lasting from 1 month before the submission deadline until the time of notification (or withdrawal). Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.
* ''Anonymized'' preprints within the anonymity period are allowed. This is currently only possible on certain platforms but ACL may consider using such a platform for all submissions in the future.
* Non-anonymized preprints ''before'' the anonymity period are allowed, although we encourage authors to wait to post them until ''after'' the anonymity period.
* If a non-anonymized preprint version exists, authors must declare its existence at submission time but should not cite it and are asked not to publicize it further during the anonymity period – the submitted paper should be as anonymous as possible.
* ACL explicitly allows updates to preprints, at all times, for the sole purpose of correcting people’s names. If the change falls within the required anonymous period of a conference, the PC Chairs should be notified of the correction.

The notion of ''preprint'' is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by "flag planting" with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.

== Review ==

To preserve the merits of double-blind review, reviewers for *ACL conferences and TACL should be instructed not to actively try to discover the identity of the authors and not to let any suspicion or knowledge of author identity affect their judgment of the paper. This should not prevent them from searching for related work, but they should take special care and postpone such searches until after they have read the paper completely and formed an initial impression of it. If a reviewer nevertheless uncovers the identity of the authors (or believes they can identify the authors for other reasons), they should inform the area chair or action editor (but not other reviewers) so that this information can be taken into account when making the final acceptance decision. 

After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask reviewers to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper, and will take this information into account when assigning and using reviews. This new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

== Citation ==

Papers submitted to *ACL conferences and TACL should in principle cite and compare to all relevant prior work, regardless of when and how that work was presented to the community, and must credit work that influenced them. To this general rule there are two important qualifications:

* For citation, refereed publications take priority over preprints. Specifically:
** Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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).
** If a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
* For comparison, papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline should be considered contemporaneous to the submission. This relieves authors from the obligation to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis, but they are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work to the degree feasible.

It follows from our recommendations about citation and comparison that failure to cite relevant prior work or failure to compare to (non-contemporaneous) empirical results may affect the assessment of a submission regardless of how the prior work was published. However, reviewers should be instructed to give authors the benefit of the doubt in cases where the work appears in preprints with no corresponding refereed publication, especially preprints that are recent and/or not widely cited. In such cases, reviewers should point authors to the non-cited work (so that they can discuss it in the camera-ready version) but not penalize the authors for missing the citation.

ACL Policies for Review and Citation

2024-01-12T13:09:27Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Submission */ paragraph boundary

The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. The policies are in effect for all *ACL conferences starting with NAACL 2018 and for TACL from the submission deadline of January 1, 2018. We recommend conferences and workshops that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.
* For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
** [[ACL Author Guidelines]]
** [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

== Submission ==

<nowiki>*</nowiki>ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized.

This rest of this section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. These restrictions do not apply to papers submitted later, although authors are still cautioned against extensive advertising. This new policy is explained [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

<nowiki>*</nowiki>ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized.
A submission will ''not'' be considered anonymized if the authors post (or update) a non-anonymized preprint version within an ''anonymity period'' lasting from 1 month before the submission deadline until the time of notification (or withdrawal). Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.
* ''Anonymized'' preprints within the anonymity period are allowed. This is currently only possible on certain platforms but ACL may consider using such a platform for all submissions in the future.
* Non-anonymized preprints ''before'' the anonymity period are allowed, although we encourage authors to wait to post them until ''after'' the anonymity period.
* If a non-anonymized preprint version exists, authors must declare its existence at submission time but should not cite it and are asked not to publicize it further during the anonymity period – the submitted paper should be as anonymous as possible.
* ACL explicitly allows updates to preprints, at all times, for the sole purpose of correcting people’s names. If the change falls within the required anonymous period of a conference, the PC Chairs should be notified of the correction.

The notion of ''preprint'' is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by "flag planting" with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.

== Review ==

To preserve the merits of double-blind review, reviewers for *ACL conferences and TACL should be instructed not to actively try to discover the identity of the authors and not to let any suspicion or knowledge of author identity affect their judgment of the paper. This should not prevent them from searching for related work, but they should take special care and postpone such searches until after they have read the paper completely and formed an initial impression of it. If a reviewer nevertheless uncovers the identity of the authors (or believes they can identify the authors for other reasons), they should inform the area chair or action editor (but not other reviewers) so that this information can be taken into account when making the final acceptance decision. 

After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask reviewers to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper, and will take this information into account when assigning and using reviews. This new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

== Citation ==

Papers submitted to *ACL conferences and TACL should in principle cite and compare to all relevant prior work, regardless of when and how that work was presented to the community, and must credit work that influenced them. To this general rule there are two important qualifications:

* For citation, refereed publications take priority over preprints. Specifically:
** Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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).
** If a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
* For comparison, papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline should be considered contemporaneous to the submission. This relieves authors from the obligation to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis, but they are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work to the degree feasible.

It follows from our recommendations about citation and comparison that failure to cite relevant prior work or failure to compare to (non-contemporaneous) empirical results may affect the assessment of a submission regardless of how the prior work was published. However, reviewers should be instructed to give authors the benefit of the doubt in cases where the work appears in preprints with no corresponding refereed publication, especially preprints that are recent and/or not widely cited. In such cases, reviewers should point authors to the non-cited work (so that they can discuss it in the camera-ready version) but not penalize the authors for missing the citation.

ACL Policies for Review and Citation

2024-01-12T13:08:50Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Submission */ anonymity still required

The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. The policies are in effect for all *ACL conferences starting with NAACL 2018 and for TACL from the submission deadline of January 1, 2018. We recommend conferences and workshops that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.
* For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
** [[ACL Author Guidelines]]
** [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

== Submission ==

<nowiki>*</nowiki>ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized.

This rest of this section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. These restrictions do not apply to papers submitted later, although authors are still cautioned against extensive advertising. This new policy is explained [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].
<nowiki>*</nowiki>ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized.
A submission will ''not'' be considered anonymized if the authors post (or update) a non-anonymized preprint version within an ''anonymity period'' lasting from 1 month before the submission deadline until the time of notification (or withdrawal). Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.
* ''Anonymized'' preprints within the anonymity period are allowed. This is currently only possible on certain platforms but ACL may consider using such a platform for all submissions in the future.
* Non-anonymized preprints ''before'' the anonymity period are allowed, although we encourage authors to wait to post them until ''after'' the anonymity period.
* If a non-anonymized preprint version exists, authors must declare its existence at submission time but should not cite it and are asked not to publicize it further during the anonymity period – the submitted paper should be as anonymous as possible.
* ACL explicitly allows updates to preprints, at all times, for the sole purpose of correcting people’s names. If the change falls within the required anonymous period of a conference, the PC Chairs should be notified of the correction.

The notion of ''preprint'' is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by "flag planting" with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.

== Review ==

To preserve the merits of double-blind review, reviewers for *ACL conferences and TACL should be instructed not to actively try to discover the identity of the authors and not to let any suspicion or knowledge of author identity affect their judgment of the paper. This should not prevent them from searching for related work, but they should take special care and postpone such searches until after they have read the paper completely and formed an initial impression of it. If a reviewer nevertheless uncovers the identity of the authors (or believes they can identify the authors for other reasons), they should inform the area chair or action editor (but not other reviewers) so that this information can be taken into account when making the final acceptance decision. 

After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask reviewers to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper, and will take this information into account when assigning and using reviews. This new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

== Citation ==

Papers submitted to *ACL conferences and TACL should in principle cite and compare to all relevant prior work, regardless of when and how that work was presented to the community, and must credit work that influenced them. To this general rule there are two important qualifications:

* For citation, refereed publications take priority over preprints. Specifically:
** Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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).
** If a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
* For comparison, papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline should be considered contemporaneous to the submission. This relieves authors from the obligation to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis, but they are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work to the degree feasible.

It follows from our recommendations about citation and comparison that failure to cite relevant prior work or failure to compare to (non-contemporaneous) empirical results may affect the assessment of a submission regardless of how the prior work was published. However, reviewers should be instructed to give authors the benefit of the doubt in cases where the work appears in preprints with no corresponding refereed publication, especially preprints that are recent and/or not widely cited. In such cases, reviewers should point authors to the non-cited work (so that they can discuss it in the camera-ready version) but not penalize the authors for missing the citation.

ACL Policies for Review and Citation

2024-01-12T13:07:54Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Submission */ cautioned authors against extensive advertising

The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. The policies are in effect for all *ACL conferences starting with NAACL 2018 and for TACL from the submission deadline of January 1, 2018. We recommend conferences and workshops that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.
* For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
** [[ACL Author Guidelines]]
** [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

== Submission ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. These restrictions do not apply to papers submitted later, although authors are still cautioned against extensive advertising. This new policy is explained [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

<nowiki>*</nowiki>ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized. A submission will ''not'' be considered anonymized if the authors post (or update) a non-anonymized preprint version within an ''anonymity period'' lasting from 1 month before the submission deadline until the time of notification (or withdrawal). Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.
* ''Anonymized'' preprints within the anonymity period are allowed. This is currently only possible on certain platforms but ACL may consider using such a platform for all submissions in the future.
* Non-anonymized preprints ''before'' the anonymity period are allowed, although we encourage authors to wait to post them until ''after'' the anonymity period.
* If a non-anonymized preprint version exists, authors must declare its existence at submission time but should not cite it and are asked not to publicize it further during the anonymity period – the submitted paper should be as anonymous as possible.
* ACL explicitly allows updates to preprints, at all times, for the sole purpose of correcting people’s names. If the change falls within the required anonymous period of a conference, the PC Chairs should be notified of the correction.

The notion of ''preprint'' is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by "flag planting" with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.

== Review ==

To preserve the merits of double-blind review, reviewers for *ACL conferences and TACL should be instructed not to actively try to discover the identity of the authors and not to let any suspicion or knowledge of author identity affect their judgment of the paper. This should not prevent them from searching for related work, but they should take special care and postpone such searches until after they have read the paper completely and formed an initial impression of it. If a reviewer nevertheless uncovers the identity of the authors (or believes they can identify the authors for other reasons), they should inform the area chair or action editor (but not other reviewers) so that this information can be taken into account when making the final acceptance decision. 

After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask reviewers to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper, and will take this information into account when assigning and using reviews. This new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

== Citation ==

Papers submitted to *ACL conferences and TACL should in principle cite and compare to all relevant prior work, regardless of when and how that work was presented to the community, and must credit work that influenced them. To this general rule there are two important qualifications:

* For citation, refereed publications take priority over preprints. Specifically:
** Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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).
** If a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
* For comparison, papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline should be considered contemporaneous to the submission. This relieves authors from the obligation to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis, but they are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work to the degree feasible.

It follows from our recommendations about citation and comparison that failure to cite relevant prior work or failure to compare to (non-contemporaneous) empirical results may affect the assessment of a submission regardless of how the prior work was published. However, reviewers should be instructed to give authors the benefit of the doubt in cases where the work appears in preprints with no corresponding refereed publication, especially preprints that are recent and/or not widely cited. In such cases, reviewers should point authors to the non-cited work (so that they can discuss it in the camera-ready version) but not penalize the authors for missing the citation.

ACL Author Guidelines

2024-01-12T13:07:18Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Preserving Double Blind Review */ cautioned authors against extensive advertising

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding reviewer guidelines, see: [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. These restrictions do not apply to papers submitted later, although authors are still cautioned against extensive advertising. This new policy is explained [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the ''anonymity period'', which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

*You ''may not'' make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) ''during'' the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

*If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you ''may'' submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

*Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you 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.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:
** You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you 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 your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

ACL Policies for Review and Citation

2024-01-12T13:05:34Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Review */ corrected and improved wording

The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. The policies are in effect for all *ACL conferences starting with NAACL 2018 and for TACL from the submission deadline of January 1, 2018. We recommend conferences and workshops that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.
* For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
** [[ACL Author Guidelines]]
** [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

== Submission ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. These restrictions do not apply to papers submitted later. This new policy is explained [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

<nowiki>*</nowiki>ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized. A submission will ''not'' be considered anonymized if the authors post (or update) a non-anonymized preprint version within an ''anonymity period'' lasting from 1 month before the submission deadline until the time of notification (or withdrawal). Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.
* ''Anonymized'' preprints within the anonymity period are allowed. This is currently only possible on certain platforms but ACL may consider using such a platform for all submissions in the future.
* Non-anonymized preprints ''before'' the anonymity period are allowed, although we encourage authors to wait to post them until ''after'' the anonymity period.
* If a non-anonymized preprint version exists, authors must declare its existence at submission time but should not cite it and are asked not to publicize it further during the anonymity period – the submitted paper should be as anonymous as possible.
* ACL explicitly allows updates to preprints, at all times, for the sole purpose of correcting people’s names. If the change falls within the required anonymous period of a conference, the PC Chairs should be notified of the correction.

The notion of ''preprint'' is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by "flag planting" with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.

== Review ==

To preserve the merits of double-blind review, reviewers for *ACL conferences and TACL should be instructed not to actively try to discover the identity of the authors and not to let any suspicion or knowledge of author identity affect their judgment of the paper. This should not prevent them from searching for related work, but they should take special care and postpone such searches until after they have read the paper completely and formed an initial impression of it. If a reviewer nevertheless uncovers the identity of the authors (or believes they can identify the authors for other reasons), they should inform the area chair or action editor (but not other reviewers) so that this information can be taken into account when making the final acceptance decision. 

After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask reviewers to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper, and will take this information into account when assigning and using reviews. This new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

== Citation ==

Papers submitted to *ACL conferences and TACL should in principle cite and compare to all relevant prior work, regardless of when and how that work was presented to the community, and must credit work that influenced them. To this general rule there are two important qualifications:

* For citation, refereed publications take priority over preprints. Specifically:
** Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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).
** If a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
* For comparison, papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline should be considered contemporaneous to the submission. This relieves authors from the obligation to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis, but they are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work to the degree feasible.

It follows from our recommendations about citation and comparison that failure to cite relevant prior work or failure to compare to (non-contemporaneous) empirical results may affect the assessment of a submission regardless of how the prior work was published. However, reviewers should be instructed to give authors the benefit of the doubt in cases where the work appears in preprints with no corresponding refereed publication, especially preprints that are recent and/or not widely cited. In such cases, reviewers should point authors to the non-cited work (so that they can discuss it in the camera-ready version) but not penalize the authors for missing the citation.

ACL Anonymity Policy

2024-01-12T12:54:42Z

Iryna Gurevych: clarification

ACL adopted the recommendations of [[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|this working group report]] on January 12, 2024. The new policy applies to subsequent submission deadlines. It will be reflected in the instructions for submissions and reviewing. Please read the report for the policy details and their motivation.

Papers that were submitted to review processes with earlier deadlines are still governed by the old anonymity policy, since they use the old review procedure.

Both old and new policies are described at [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].

ACL Anonymity Policy

2024-01-12T12:53:34Z

Iryna Gurevych: clarification

ACL adopted the recommendations of [[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|this working group report]] on January 12, 2024. The new policy applies to subsequent submission deadlines. It will be reflected in the instructions for submissions and reviewing. Please read the report for the policy details and their motivation.

Papers that were submitted to review processes with earlier deadlines are still governed by the [[ ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation|old anonymity policy]], since they use the old review procedure.

ACL Author Guidelines

2024-01-12T12:50:01Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Preserving Double Blind Review */ wording

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding reviewer guidelines, see: [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. These restrictions do not apply to papers submitted later. This new policy is explained [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the ''anonymity period'', which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

*You ''may not'' make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) ''during'' the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

*If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you ''may'' submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

*Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you 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.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:
** You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you 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 your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

ACL Policies for Review and Citation

2024-01-12T12:49:26Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Submission */ wording

The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. The policies are in effect for all *ACL conferences starting with NAACL 2018 and for TACL from the submission deadline of January 1, 2018. We recommend conferences and workshops that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.
* For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
** [[ACL Author Guidelines]]
** [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

== Submission ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. These restrictions do not apply to papers submitted later. This new policy is explained [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

<nowiki>*</nowiki>ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized. A submission will ''not'' be considered anonymized if the authors post (or update) a non-anonymized preprint version within an ''anonymity period'' lasting from 1 month before the submission deadline until the time of notification (or withdrawal). Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.
* ''Anonymized'' preprints within the anonymity period are allowed. This is currently only possible on certain platforms but ACL may consider using such a platform for all submissions in the future.
* Non-anonymized preprints ''before'' the anonymity period are allowed, although we encourage authors to wait to post them until ''after'' the anonymity period.
* If a non-anonymized preprint version exists, authors must declare its existence at submission time but should not cite it and are asked not to publicize it further during the anonymity period – the submitted paper should be as anonymous as possible.
* ACL explicitly allows updates to preprints, at all times, for the sole purpose of correcting people’s names. If the change falls within the required anonymous period of a conference, the PC Chairs should be notified of the correction.

The notion of ''preprint'' is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by "flag planting" with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.

== Review ==

To preserve the merits of double-blind review, reviewers for *ACL conferences and TACL should be instructed not to actively try to discover the identity of the authors and not to let any suspicion or knowledge of author identity affect their judgment of the paper. This should not prevent them from searching for related work, but they should take special care and postpone such searches until after they have read the paper completely and formed an initial impression of it. If a reviewer nevertheless uncovers the identity of the authors (or believes they can identify the authors for other reasons), they should inform the area chair or action editor (but not other reviewers) so that this information can be taken into account when making the final acceptance decision. 

After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask authors to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper. This new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

== Citation ==

Papers submitted to *ACL conferences and TACL should in principle cite and compare to all relevant prior work, regardless of when and how that work was presented to the community, and must credit work that influenced them. To this general rule there are two important qualifications:

* For citation, refereed publications take priority over preprints. Specifically:
** Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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).
** If a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
* For comparison, papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline should be considered contemporaneous to the submission. This relieves authors from the obligation to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis, but they are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work to the degree feasible.

It follows from our recommendations about citation and comparison that failure to cite relevant prior work or failure to compare to (non-contemporaneous) empirical results may affect the assessment of a submission regardless of how the prior work was published. However, reviewers should be instructed to give authors the benefit of the doubt in cases where the work appears in preprints with no corresponding refereed publication, especially preprints that are recent and/or not widely cited. In such cases, reviewers should point authors to the non-cited work (so that they can discuss it in the camera-ready version) but not penalize the authors for missing the citation.

ACL Policies for Review and Citation

2024-01-12T12:48:24Z

Iryna Gurevych: noted updates to policy, but restored old submission section (still applies to papers currently in review)

The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. The policies are in effect for all *ACL conferences starting with NAACL 2018 and for TACL from the submission deadline of January 1, 2018. We recommend conferences and workshops that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.
* For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
** [[ACL Author Guidelines]]
** [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

== Submission ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. For papers submitted later, the new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

<nowiki>*</nowiki>ACL conferences and TACL require that submissions be anonymized. A submission will ''not'' be considered anonymized if the authors post (or update) a non-anonymized preprint version within an ''anonymity period'' lasting from 1 month before the submission deadline until the time of notification (or withdrawal). Submissions will be rejected if not properly anonymized.
* ''Anonymized'' preprints within the anonymity period are allowed. This is currently only possible on certain platforms but ACL may consider using such a platform for all submissions in the future.
* Non-anonymized preprints ''before'' the anonymity period are allowed, although we encourage authors to wait to post them until ''after'' the anonymity period.
* If a non-anonymized preprint version exists, authors must declare its existence at submission time but should not cite it and are asked not to publicize it further during the anonymity period – the submitted paper should be as anonymous as possible.
* ACL explicitly allows updates to preprints, at all times, for the sole purpose of correcting people’s names. If the change falls within the required anonymous period of a conference, the PC Chairs should be notified of the correction.

The notion of ''preprint'' is understood broadly to refer to any non-refereed paper posted online, including but not limited to preprint servers such as arXiv. Note that the rule applies only to preprints that authors post themselves, so it does not apply to (say) non-refereed proceedings volumes. The restriction on updating is to prevent authors from circumventing these rules by "flag planting" with a placeholder version over 1 month in advance.

== Review ==

To preserve the merits of double-blind review, reviewers for *ACL conferences and TACL should be instructed not to actively try to discover the identity of the authors and not to let any suspicion or knowledge of author identity affect their judgment of the paper. This should not prevent them from searching for related work, but they should take special care and postpone such searches until after they have read the paper completely and formed an initial impression of it. If a reviewer nevertheless uncovers the identity of the authors (or believes they can identify the authors for other reasons), they should inform the area chair or action editor (but not other reviewers) so that this information can be taken into account when making the final acceptance decision. 

After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask authors to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper. This new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

== Citation ==

Papers submitted to *ACL conferences and TACL should in principle cite and compare to all relevant prior work, regardless of when and how that work was presented to the community, and must credit work that influenced them. To this general rule there are two important qualifications:

* For citation, refereed publications take priority over preprints. Specifically:
** Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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).
** If a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
* For comparison, papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline should be considered contemporaneous to the submission. This relieves authors from the obligation to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis, but they are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work to the degree feasible.

It follows from our recommendations about citation and comparison that failure to cite relevant prior work or failure to compare to (non-contemporaneous) empirical results may affect the assessment of a submission regardless of how the prior work was published. However, reviewers should be instructed to give authors the benefit of the doubt in cases where the work appears in preprints with no corresponding refereed publication, especially preprints that are recent and/or not widely cited. In such cases, reviewers should point authors to the non-cited work (so that they can discuss it in the camera-ready version) but not penalize the authors for missing the citation.

ACL Author Guidelines

2024-01-12T12:45:00Z

Iryna Gurevych: improved style of links to previous reports

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding reviewer guidelines, see: [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. The new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the ''anonymity period'', which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

*You ''may not'' make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) ''during'' the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

*If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you ''may'' submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

*Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you 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.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:
** You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you 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 your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

ACL Reviewer Guidelines

2024-01-12T12:44:32Z

Iryna Gurevych: wording

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding author guidelines, see: [[ACL Author Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, please refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

* Reviewing may involve an online search for related work. However, do not set out to uncover the identity of the authors and try not to let any suspicions regarding author identity affect your judgement. To reduce the risk of bias, it is a good idea to read the paper and draft an initial review before you carry out any online searches that risk discovering authorship. You should be especially careful if an area chair has informed you that a non-anonymized version of the paper is available online.
* If you do become aware of the authors' identity (by whatever means), let the area chairs (but not your fellow reviewers) know.
* If you come across a preprint or paper that has a substantial text overlap with the submission, report this to the area chairs even if the existence of a preprint has been declared, since you do not know whether the authors of the discovered paper are the authors of the submission under review, and so the possibility of plagiarism needs to be considered.
* After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask authors to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* Evaluate papers based on your knowledge of the subject, regardless of where you gained this knowledge. If you are aware of relevant publicly available research that has not been cited in the paper you are reviewing, you should bring it to the attention of the authors, irrespective of whether it is described in a preprint or a refereed publication. However, if the work appears only in a preprint, especially one that is recent and/or not widely cited, you should in general give authors the benefit of the doubt and not penalize them for the missing citation.
* Papers should include appropriate discussion of related work, potentially including both preprints and refereed publications. However, it is not reasonable to expect a time-consuming empirical comparison with work that has appeared ''less than 3 months before the submission deadline''. In this situation, the two papers are considered to be ''contemporaneous''. Contemporaneous papers may affect your perspective on the ''quality'' of a submission, but should be disregarded when evaluating the ''novelty'' of the submission, unless there is evidence that they have influenced the submission.

ACL Reviewer Guidelines

2024-01-12T12:44:01Z

Iryna Gurevych: improved style of links to previous reports

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding author guidelines, see: [[ACL Author Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, we refer to the reports of the [[Media:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|2017]] and [[ACL Anonymity Policy|2023]] working groups appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

* Reviewing may involve an online search for related work. However, do not set out to uncover the identity of the authors and try not to let any suspicions regarding author identity affect your judgement. To reduce the risk of bias, it is a good idea to read the paper and draft an initial review before you carry out any online searches that risk discovering authorship. You should be especially careful if an area chair has informed you that a non-anonymized version of the paper is available online.
* If you do become aware of the authors' identity (by whatever means), let the area chairs (but not your fellow reviewers) know.
* If you come across a preprint or paper that has a substantial text overlap with the submission, report this to the area chairs even if the existence of a preprint has been declared, since you do not know whether the authors of the discovered paper are the authors of the submission under review, and so the possibility of plagiarism needs to be considered.
* After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask authors to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* Evaluate papers based on your knowledge of the subject, regardless of where you gained this knowledge. If you are aware of relevant publicly available research that has not been cited in the paper you are reviewing, you should bring it to the attention of the authors, irrespective of whether it is described in a preprint or a refereed publication. However, if the work appears only in a preprint, especially one that is recent and/or not widely cited, you should in general give authors the benefit of the doubt and not penalize them for the missing citation.
* Papers should include appropriate discussion of related work, potentially including both preprints and refereed publications. However, it is not reasonable to expect a time-consuming empirical comparison with work that has appeared ''less than 3 months before the submission deadline''. In this situation, the two papers are considered to be ''contemporaneous''. Contemporaneous papers may affect your perspective on the ''quality'' of a submission, but should be disregarded when evaluating the ''novelty'' of the submission, unless there is evidence that they have influenced the submission.

ACL Author Guidelines

2024-01-12T12:29:24Z

Iryna Gurevych: updated header material

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding reviewer guidelines, see: [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, we refer to the report of the 2017 working group appointed by the ACL Executive Committee: [[File:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf]]
* On January 12, 2024, that report was partly superseded by the [[ACL Anonymity Policy|report of the 2023 working group]].

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. The new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the ''anonymity period'', which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

*You ''may not'' make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) ''during'' the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

*If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you ''may'' submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

*Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you 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.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:
** You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you 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 your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

ACL Reviewer Guidelines

2024-01-12T12:28:00Z

Iryna Gurevych: bad link anchor

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding author guidelines, see: [[ACL Author Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, we refer to the report of the 2017 working group appointed by the ACL Executive Committee: [[File:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf]]
* On January 12, 2024, that report was partly superseded by the [[ACL Anonymity Policy|report of the 2023 working group]].

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

* Reviewing may involve an online search for related work. However, do not set out to uncover the identity of the authors and try not to let any suspicions regarding author identity affect your judgement. To reduce the risk of bias, it is a good idea to read the paper and draft an initial review before you carry out any online searches that risk discovering authorship. You should be especially careful if an area chair has informed you that a non-anonymized version of the paper is available online.
* If you do become aware of the authors' identity (by whatever means), let the area chairs (but not your fellow reviewers) know.
* If you come across a preprint or paper that has a substantial text overlap with the submission, report this to the area chairs even if the existence of a preprint has been declared, since you do not know whether the authors of the discovered paper are the authors of the submission under review, and so the possibility of plagiarism needs to be considered.
* After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask authors to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* Evaluate papers based on your knowledge of the subject, regardless of where you gained this knowledge. If you are aware of relevant publicly available research that has not been cited in the paper you are reviewing, you should bring it to the attention of the authors, irrespective of whether it is described in a preprint or a refereed publication. However, if the work appears only in a preprint, especially one that is recent and/or not widely cited, you should in general give authors the benefit of the doubt and not penalize them for the missing citation.
* Papers should include appropriate discussion of related work, potentially including both preprints and refereed publications. However, it is not reasonable to expect a time-consuming empirical comparison with work that has appeared ''less than 3 months before the submission deadline''. In this situation, the two papers are considered to be ''contemporaneous''. Contemporaneous papers may affect your perspective on the ''quality'' of a submission, but should be disregarded when evaluating the ''novelty'' of the submission, unless there is evidence that they have influenced the submission.

ACL Reviewer Guidelines

2024-01-12T12:24:51Z

Iryna Gurevych: link to new working group report

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For corresponding author guidelines, see: [[ACL Author Guidelines]].
* For further motivation and discussion, we refer to the [[File:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf|report of the 2017 working group]] appointed by the ACL Executive Committee.
* On January 12, 2024, that report was partly superseded by the [[ACL Anonymity Policy|report of the 2023 working group]].

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

* Reviewing may involve an online search for related work. However, do not set out to uncover the identity of the authors and try not to let any suspicions regarding author identity affect your judgement. To reduce the risk of bias, it is a good idea to read the paper and draft an initial review before you carry out any online searches that risk discovering authorship. You should be especially careful if an area chair has informed you that a non-anonymized version of the paper is available online.
* If you do become aware of the authors' identity (by whatever means), let the area chairs (but not your fellow reviewers) know.
* If you come across a preprint or paper that has a substantial text overlap with the submission, report this to the area chairs even if the existence of a preprint has been declared, since you do not know whether the authors of the discovered paper are the authors of the submission under review, and so the possibility of plagiarism needs to be considered.
* After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask authors to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* Evaluate papers based on your knowledge of the subject, regardless of where you gained this knowledge. If you are aware of relevant publicly available research that has not been cited in the paper you are reviewing, you should bring it to the attention of the authors, irrespective of whether it is described in a preprint or a refereed publication. However, if the work appears only in a preprint, especially one that is recent and/or not widely cited, you should in general give authors the benefit of the doubt and not penalize them for the missing citation.
* Papers should include appropriate discussion of related work, potentially including both preprints and refereed publications. However, it is not reasonable to expect a time-consuming empirical comparison with work that has appeared ''less than 3 months before the submission deadline''. In this situation, the two papers are considered to be ''contemporaneous''. Contemporaneous papers may affect your perspective on the ''quality'' of a submission, but should be disregarded when evaluating the ''novelty'' of the submission, unless there is evidence that they have influenced the submission.

ACL Reviewer Guidelines

2024-01-12T12:21:48Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Preserving Double Blind Review */ added link to policy change

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For further motivation and discussion, we refer to the report of the working group appointed by the ACL Executive Committee: [[File:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf]].
* For corresponding author guidelines, see: [[ACL Author Guidelines]].

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

* Reviewing may involve an online search for related work. However, do not set out to uncover the identity of the authors and try not to let any suspicions regarding author identity affect your judgement. To reduce the risk of bias, it is a good idea to read the paper and draft an initial review before you carry out any online searches that risk discovering authorship. You should be especially careful if an area chair has informed you that a non-anonymized version of the paper is available online.
* If you do become aware of the authors' identity (by whatever means), let the area chairs (but not your fellow reviewers) know.
* If you come across a preprint or paper that has a substantial text overlap with the submission, report this to the area chairs even if the existence of a preprint has been declared, since you do not know whether the authors of the discovered paper are the authors of the submission under review, and so the possibility of plagiarism needs to be considered.
* After January 12, 2024, ACL reviewing procedures will explicitly ask authors to disclose any outside knowledge they may have about a submitted paper. More information is [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

== Citation and Comparison ==

* Evaluate papers based on your knowledge of the subject, regardless of where you gained this knowledge. If you are aware of relevant publicly available research that has not been cited in the paper you are reviewing, you should bring it to the attention of the authors, irrespective of whether it is described in a preprint or a refereed publication. However, if the work appears only in a preprint, especially one that is recent and/or not widely cited, you should in general give authors the benefit of the doubt and not penalize them for the missing citation.
* Papers should include appropriate discussion of related work, potentially including both preprints and refereed publications. However, it is not reasonable to expect a time-consuming empirical comparison with work that has appeared ''less than 3 months before the submission deadline''. In this situation, the two papers are considered to be ''contemporaneous''. Contemporaneous papers may affect your perspective on the ''quality'' of a submission, but should be disregarded when evaluating the ''novelty'' of the submission, unless there is evidence that they have influenced the submission.

ACL Author Guidelines

2024-01-12T12:15:50Z

Iryna Gurevych: /* Preserving Double Blind Review */ lifting of anonymity policy

The following guidelines can be used by conferences and journals who adopt the [[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]].
* For further motivation and discussion, we refer to the report of the working group appointed by the ACL Executive Committee: [[File:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf]].
* For corresponding reviewer guidelines, see: [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]].

== Preserving Double Blind Review ==

This section applies only to papers that were submitted for deadlines before January 12, 2024. The new policy is described [[ACL Anonymity Policy|here]].

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed fairly. The rules make reference to the ''anonymity period'', which runs from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

*You ''may not'' make a non-anonymized version of your paper available online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server) ''during'' the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand another paper having essentially the same scientific content but possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure) and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that it summarizes).

*If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online before the start of the anonymity period, you ''may'' submit an anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity period.

*Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous version available online before the start of the anonymity period, this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain, and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you 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.

== Citation and Comparison ==

* If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However, refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in preprints. Specifically:
** You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your submission, but you 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 your submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis.

ACL Anonymity Policy

2024-01-12T12:13:04Z

Iryna Gurevych:

ACL adopted the recommendations of [[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|this working group report]] on January 12, 2024. The new policy applies to subsequent submission deadlines. It will be reflected in the instructions for submissions and reviewing. Please read the report for the policy details and their motivation.

Papers that were submitted to review processes with earlier deadlines are still governed by the [[ACL Author Guidelines|old anonymity policy]], since they use the old review procedure.

ACL Anonymity Policy

2024-01-12T12:07:48Z

Iryna Gurevych:

ACL Anonymity Policy

2024-01-12T12:07:15Z

Iryna Gurevych: added effective date and explanatory text

ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation

2024-01-12T10:07:24Z

Iryna Gurevych: Iryna Gurevych moved page ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation to ACL Policies for Review and Citation

#REDIRECT [[ACL Policies for Review and Citation]]

ACL Policies for Review and Citation

2024-01-12T10:07:24Z

Iryna Gurevych: Iryna Gurevych moved page ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation to ACL Policies for Review and Citation

The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. The policies are in effect for all *ACL conferences starting with NAACL 2018 and for TACL from the submission deadline of January 1, 2018. We recommend conferences and workshops that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

* For further motivation and discussion, we refer to the report of the working group appointed by the ACL Executive Committee: [[File:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf]].
* For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
** [[ACL Author Guidelines]]
** [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

== Review ==

To preserve the merits of double-blind review, reviewers for *ACL conferences and TACL should be instructed not to actively try to discover the identity of the authors and not to let any suspicion or knowledge of author identity affect their judgment of the paper. This should not prevent them from searching for related work, but they should take special care and postpone such searches until after they have read the paper completely and formed an initial impression of it. If a reviewer nevertheless uncovers the identity of the authors (or believes they can identify the authors for other reasons), they should inform the area chair or action editor (but not other reviewers) so that this information can be taken into account when making the final acceptance decision. To be able to track how often this happens, we also recommend adding a question to the review form about whether reviewers think they can identify the authors and who they think the authors are.

== Citation ==

Papers submitted to *ACL conferences and TACL should in principle cite and compare to all relevant prior work, regardless of when and how that work was presented to the community, and must credit work that influenced them. To this general rule there are two important qualifications:

* For citation, refereed publications take priority over preprints. Specifically:
** Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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).
** If a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
* For comparison, papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline should be considered contemporaneous to the submission. This relieves authors from the obligation to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis, but they are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work to the degree feasible.

It follows from our recommendations about citation and comparison that failure to cite relevant prior work or failure to compare to (non-contemporaneous) empirical results may affect the assessment of a submission regardless of how the prior work was published. However, reviewers should be instructed to give authors the benefit of the doubt in cases where the work appears in preprints with no corresponding refereed publication, especially preprints that are recent and/or not widely cited. In such cases, reviewers should point authors to the non-cited work (so that they can discuss it in the camera-ready version) but not penalize the authors for missing the citation.

ACL Policies for Review and Citation

2024-01-12T09:58:38Z

Iryna Gurevych:

The following policies are adopted for *ACL conferences (ACL, NAACL, EACL) and the TACL journal in the interest of maintaining and protecting double-blind review without sacrificing the positive effects of preprint publishing. The policies are in effect for all *ACL conferences starting with NAACL 2018 and for TACL from the submission deadline of January 1, 2018. We recommend conferences and workshops that are co-located with *ACL conferences and use double-blind review to adopt the same policies unless this conflicts with other policies they have.

* For further motivation and discussion, we refer to the report of the working group appointed by the ACL Executive Committee: [[File:ACL Guidelines for Submission, Review and Citation.pdf]].
* For guidelines to be used by conferences and journals adopting these policies, see:
** [[ACL Author Guidelines]]
** [[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

== Review ==

To preserve the merits of double-blind review, reviewers for *ACL conferences and TACL should be instructed not to actively try to discover the identity of the authors and not to let any suspicion or knowledge of author identity affect their judgment of the paper. This should not prevent them from searching for related work, but they should take special care and postpone such searches until after they have read the paper completely and formed an initial impression of it. If a reviewer nevertheless uncovers the identity of the authors (or believes they can identify the authors for other reasons), they should inform the area chair or action editor (but not other reviewers) so that this information can be taken into account when making the final acceptance decision. To be able to track how often this happens, we also recommend adding a question to the review form about whether reviewers think they can identify the authors and who they think the authors are.

== Citation ==

Papers submitted to *ACL conferences and TACL should in principle cite and compare to all relevant prior work, regardless of when and how that work was presented to the community, and must credit work that influenced them. To this general rule there are two important qualifications:

* For citation, refereed publications take priority over preprints. Specifically:
** Authors are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to their 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).
** If a preprint has been superseded by a refereed publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to or instead of the preprint version.
* For comparison, papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before the submission deadline should be considered contemporaneous to the submission. This relieves authors from the obligation to make detailed comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth analysis, but they are still expected to cite and discuss contemporaneous work to the degree feasible.

It follows from our recommendations about citation and comparison that failure to cite relevant prior work or failure to compare to (non-contemporaneous) empirical results may affect the assessment of a submission regardless of how the prior work was published. However, reviewers should be instructed to give authors the benefit of the doubt in cases where the work appears in preprints with no corresponding refereed publication, especially preprints that are recent and/or not widely cited. In such cases, reviewers should point authors to the non-cited work (so that they can discuss it in the camera-ready version) but not penalize the authors for missing the citation.

File:ACL Anonymity Policy.pdf

2024-01-12T09:50:32Z

Iryna Gurevych:

ACL Policies

2024-01-12T09:50:01Z

Iryna Gurevych:

== Policies ==

*[[ACL Conference Awards Policy]]

*[[ACL COVID Policy]]

*[[ACL Privacy Policy]]

*[[Anti-Harassment Policy]]

*[[ACL Whistleblower Protection Policy]]

*[[ACL Conflict-of-interest policy]]

*[[ACL Conference Conflict-of-interest policy]]

*[[ACL Conference Consistency policy]]

*[[ACL Document Retention and Destruction Policy]]

*[[ACL Policy on Political Statements and Actions]]

*[[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]]

*[[Policy on Memorial Services]]

*[[ACL Sponsorship COI Policy]]

*[[CL Journal COI Policy]]

*[[Media:ACL_Efficient_NLP_Policy.pdf|ACL Efficient NLP Policy]]

*[[ACL Name Change Policy]]

*[[Media:ACL_Anonymity_Policy.pdf|ACL Anonymity Policy]]

== Proposals ==

*[[Short-Term Reform Proposals for ACL Reviewing]]

*[[ACL Rolling Review Proposal]]

*[[Review Data Collection at *ACL]]

*[[Formation of the ACL Ethics Committee]]

== Awards ==

*[[Test-of-Time Papers Award]]

*[[Lifetime Achievement Award]]

*[[Dragomir Radev Distinguished Service Award]]

== Procedures ==

*[[Test-of-Time Papers Process]]

*[[Procedure for composing the new Nominating Committee]]

*[[Fellows Program]]

*[[Process for Ad Hoc ACL Leadership Roles]]

== Guidelines ==

*[[ACL Author Guidelines]]

*[[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

2023Q3 Reports: ACL 2024

2023-06-05T12:32:07Z

Iryna Gurevych: Created page with "The ACL 2024 will be held in Bangkok from August 11-16, 2024. The final decision about the venue is pending. I organize a panel discussion at ACL 2023 on the future of NLP i..."

The ACL 2024 will be held in Bangkok from August 11-16, 2024. The final decision about the venue is pending.

I organize a panel discussion at ACL 2023 on the future of NLP in the era of Large Language Models. The panel will be part of the ACL 2023 business meeting. Topics include:
* New opportunities (e.g., artificial general intelligence, responsible NLP)
* Technical challenges (e.g., multimodality, instruction-tuning, etc.)
* Real life problems & societal implications (e.g., hallucinations, biases, future job market)
* LLMs and the future of NLP
* Open-science vs. commercial LLMs

ARR process:
* Discussions with the ARR have continued
* ACL has approved a budget to support the technical development; ARR processes were improved
* ACL 2024 and NAACL 2024 will be ARR-only

2023Q1 Reports: ACL 2024

2023-01-30T09:45:56Z

Iryna Gurevych: Created page with "Together with the ACL business office and the ACL conference officer, we have initiated a thorough revision of the conference handbook. There will be a group of recent and cur..."

Together with the ACL business office and the ACL conference officer, we have initiated a thorough revision of the conference handbook. There will be a group of recent and current GCs and PC co-chairs working on this throughout the year.

In addition, it was agreed that the ACL 2024 GC can join a site visit in Bangkok of the ACL business office about half a year before the conference takes place.

2022Q3 Reports: ACL 2024

2022-11-09T08:14:05Z

Iryna Gurevych:

ACL 2024 will be held in Bangkok, Thailand in July or August, in collaboration with AACL. The hotel and social event venues are still being decided.

The General Chair is Claire Gardent (France). The Program Chairs are Lun-Wei Ku (Taiwan), Andre Martins (Portugal) and Vivek Srikumar (USA).

Review Data Collection at *ACL

2022-08-25T11:09:09Z

Iryna Gurevych:

''This wiki page contains several documents related to our proposals on peer reviewing data collection at *ACL.''
''The documents have been prepared by Iryna Gurevych and Ilia Kuznetsov as a result of discussions with the ACL Reviewing committee and ACL conference officer Yusuke Miyao (conceptualization), program chairs and community of COLING-2020 (conceptualization, pilot, community feedback), as well as legal counseling by Dorothy Deng (license agreement and consent).''

=== Updates ===
* March 2022: [[Media:Review_Data_Collection_ 2022_ Report_Proposal.pdf|Progress report and amendments]] to the original proposal in terms of data collection, access and storage.

=== Summary ===
We propose two initiatives aiming at facilitating ethical, consent-driven research in NLP for peer reviewing, and peer reviewing for NLP. The first initiative '''concerns the collection of peer review and manuscript data from *ACL events'''. We cover the major challenges in this process and propose solutions, as well as report on a pilot study conducted at COLING-2020, where some of those solutions were implemented. The second initiative aims to '''provide a structured way to study and compare peer reviewing workflows''' in the *ACL community. For this we propose to create a centralized repository of anonymized numerical data from ACL conferences. This repository can serve as an anchor point for future conference organizers and provide a bridge to the meta-science and science-of-science communities that have been working on similar issues in other disciplines and research fields.

=== Documents ===
# The [[Media:1._Review_collection_at_ACL_(slides).pdf|slide deck]] briefly summarizes the two proposals;
# The [[Media:2._Review_collection_at_ACL.pdf|full document]] elaborates on the proposals in further detail. In addition, we provide
# the example License agreements for [[Media:3._ACL_License_Blind_Submission_v1.pdf|blind submission data]]
# and [[Media:4._ACL_License_Peer_Reviews_v2.pdf|peer reviewing data]].

=== Contact ===
If you have commentaries, questions or suggestions regarding the proposal, do not hesitate to contact:

Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, [mailto:gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de] 
Dr. Ilia Kuznetsov, PhD [mailto:kuznetsov@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de kuznetsov@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de]

Review Data Collection at *ACL

2022-08-25T11:08:51Z

Iryna Gurevych:

''This wiki page contains several documents related to our proposals on peer reviewing data collection at *ACL.''
''The documents have been prepared by Iryna Gurevych and Ilia Kuznetsov as a result of discussions with the ACL Reviewing committee and ACL conference officer Yusuke Miyao (conceptualization), program chairs and community of COLING-2020 (conceptualization, pilot, community feedback), as well as legal counseling by Dorothy Deng (license agreement and consent).''

=== Updates ===
* March 2022: [[Media:Review_Data_Collection_ 2022_ Report_Proposal.pdf|Progress report and amendments]] to the original proposal in terms of data collection, access and storage.

=== Summary ===
We propose two initiatives aiming at facilitating ethical, consent-driven research in NLP for peer reviewing, and peer reviewing for NLP. The first initiative '''concerns the collection of peer review and manuscript data from *ACL events'''. We cover the major challenges in this process and propose solutions, as well as report on a pilot study conducted at COLING-2020, where some of those solutions were implemented. The second initiative aims to '''provide a structured way to study and compare peer reviewing workflows''' in the *ACL community. For this we propose to create a centralized repository of anonymized numerical data from ACL conferences. This repository can serve as an anchor point for future conference organizers and provide a bridge to the meta-science and science-of-science communities that have been working on similar issues in other disciplines and research fields.

=== Documents ===
# The [[Media:1._Review_collection_at_ACL_(slides).pdf|slide deck]] briefly summarizes the two proposals;
# The [[Media:2._Review_collection_at_ACL.pdf|full document]] elaborates on the proposals in further detail. In addition, we provide
# the example License agreements for [[Media:3._ACL_License_Blind_Submission_v1.pdf|blind submission data]]
# and [[Media:4._ACL_License_Peer_Reviews_v2.pdf|peer reviewing data]].

=== Contact ===
If you have commentaries, questions or suggestions regarding the proposal, do not hesitate to contact:

Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, [mailto:gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de] 
Dr. Ilia Kuznetsov, [mailto:kuznetsov@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de kuznetsov@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de]

Review Data Collection at *ACL

2022-08-25T11:07:57Z

Iryna Gurevych:

''This wiki page contains several documents related to our proposals on peer reviewing data collection at *ACL.''
''The documents have been prepared by Iryna Gurevych and Ilia Kuznetsov as a result of discussions with the ACL Reviewing committee and ACL conference officer Yusuke Miyao (conceptualization), program chairs and community of COLING-2020 (conceptualization, pilot, community feedback), as well as legal counseling by Dorothy Deng (license agreement and consent).''

=== Updates ===
* March 2022: [[Media:Review_Data_Collection_ 2022_ Report_Proposal.pdf|Progress report and amendments]] to the original proposal in terms of data collection, access and storage.

=== Summary ===
We propose two initiatives aiming at facilitating ethical, consent-driven research in NLP for peer reviewing, and peer reviewing for NLP. The first initiative '''concerns the collection of peer review and manuscript data from *ACL events'''. We cover the major challenges in this process and propose solutions, as well as report on a pilot study conducted at COLING-2020, where some of those solutions were implemented. The second initiative aims to '''provide a structured way to study and compare peer reviewing workflows''' in the *ACL community. For this we propose to create a centralized repository of anonymized numerical data from ACL conferences. This repository can serve as an anchor point for future conference organizers and provide a bridge to the meta-science and science-of-science communities that have been working on similar issues in other disciplines and research fields.

=== Documents ===
# The [[Media:1._Review_collection_at_ACL_(slides).pdf|slide deck]] briefly summarizes the two proposals;
# The [[Media:2._Review_collection_at_ACL.pdf|full document]] elaborates on the proposals in further detail. In addition, we provide
# the example License agreements for [[Media:3._ACL_License_Blind_Submission_v1.pdf|blind submission data]]
# and [[Media:4._ACL_License_Peer_Reviews_v2.pdf|peer reviewing data]].

=== Contact ===
If you have commentaries, questions or suggestions regarding the proposal, do not hesitate to contact:

Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, [mailto:gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de] 
Ilia Kuznetsov, [mailto:kuznetsov@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de kuznetsov@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de]

2022Q3 Reports: ACL 2024

2022-06-22T07:17:54Z

Iryna Gurevych: Created page with "ACL 2024 will be held in Bangkok, Thailand in July or August, in collaboration with AACL. The hotel and social event venues are still being decided. The General Chair is Clai..."

File:Review Data Collection 2022 Report Proposal.pdf

2022-04-05T10:47:28Z

Iryna Gurevych:

Review Data Collection at *ACL

2022-04-05T10:47:08Z

Iryna Gurevych:

''This wiki page contains several documents related to our proposals on peer reviewing data collection at *ACL.''
''The documents has been prepared by Iryna Gurevych and Ilia Kuznetsov as a result of discussions with the ACL Reviewing committee and ACL conference officer Yusuke Miyao (conceptualization), program chairs and community of COLING-2020 (conceptualization, pilot, community feedback), as well as legal counseling by Dorothy Deng (license agreement and consent).''

=== Updates ===
* March 2022: [[Media:Review_Data_Collection_ 2022_ Report_Proposal.pdf|Progress report and amendments]] to the original proposal in terms of data collection, access and storage.

=== Summary ===
We propose two initiatives aiming at facilitating ethical, consent-driven research in NLP for peer reviewing, and peer reviewing for NLP. The first initiative '''concerns the collection of peer review and manuscript data from *ACL events'''. We cover the major challenges in this process and propose solutions, as well as report on a pilot study conducted at COLING-2020, where some of those solutions were implemented. The second initiative aims to '''provide a structured way to study and compare peer reviewing workflows''' in the *ACL community. For this we propose to create a centralized repository of anonymized numerical data from ACL conferences. This repository can serve as an anchor point for future conference organizers and provide a bridge to the meta-science and science-of-science communities that have been working on similar issues in other disciplines and research fields.

=== Documents ===
# The [[Media:1._Review_collection_at_ACL_(slides).pdf|slide deck]] briefly summarizes the two proposals;
# The [[Media:2._Review_collection_at_ACL.pdf|full document]] elaborates on the proposals in further detail. In addition, we provide
# the example License agreements for [[Media:3._ACL_License_Blind_Submission_v1.pdf|blind submission data]]
# and [[Media:4._ACL_License_Peer_Reviews_v2.pdf|peer reviewing data]].

=== Contact ===
If you have commentaries, questions or suggestions regarding the proposal, do not hesitate to contact:

Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, [mailto:gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de gurevych@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de] 
Ilia Kuznetsov, [mailto:kuznetsov@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de kuznetsov@ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de]

ACL Policies

2022-04-04T11:17:47Z

Iryna Gurevych:

== Policies ==

*[[ACL Privacy Policy]]

*[[Anti-Harassment Policy]]

*[[ACL Whistleblower Protection Policy]]

*[[ACL Conflict-of-interest policy]]

*[[ACL Conference Conflict-of-interest policy]]

*[[ACL Conference Consistency policy]]

*[[ACL Document Retention and Destruction Policy]]

*[[ACL Policy on Political Statements and Actions]]

*[[ACL Policies for Submission, Review and Citation]]

*[[Policy on Obituary]]

*[[ACL Sponsorship COI Policy]]

*[[CL Journal COI Policy]]

*[[Media:ACL_Efficient_NLP_Policy.pdf|ACL Efficient NLP Policy]]

== Proposals ==

*[[Short-Term Reform Proposals for ACL Reviewing]]

*[[ACL Rolling Review Proposal]]

*[[Review Data Collection at *ACL]]

*[[Formation of the ACL Ethics Committee]]

== Awards ==

*[[Test-of-Time Papers Award]]

*[[Lifetime Achievement Award]]

*[[Distinguished Service Award]]

== Procedures ==

*[[Test-of-Time Papers Process]]

*[[Procedure for composing the new Nominating Committee]]

*[[Fellows Program]]

*[[Process for Ad Hoc ACL Leadership Roles]]

== Guidelines ==

*[[ACL Author Guidelines]]

*[[ACL Reviewer Guidelines]]

File:ACL Efficient NLP Policy.pdf

2022-04-04T11:15:17Z

Iryna Gurevych:

2022Q1 Reports: ACL 2024

2022-03-21T10:00:00Z

Iryna Gurevych:

ACL2024 will be held in the Asia-Pacific Region.

We have received four draft proposals by the January 21 deadline.

I do not think we need to solicit other proposals at this point.

The next steps are:
* Through March 1, 2022: Feedback to bidders
* March 31, 2022: Final bids due
* May, 2022: Bid selected and site announced during ACL 2022

Update: March, 14th, 2022: We have assembled a really great and balanced set of people to become the GC and PC co-chairs of ACL 2024:

General Chair:
* '''Claire Gardent''': France: UTC +1

PCs:
* '''Lun-Wei Ku''': Taiwan: UTC +8
* '''Andre Martins''': Switzerland: UTC +1
* '''Vivek Srikumar''': USA: UTC -7

The ACL working group on "Efficient NLP":
* has come up with a set of recommendations and a proposal for their implementation
* has agreed on a collaboration with the PC co-chairs of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
* will organize a Dagstuhl seminar this year where the activities of the working group are refined and further developed in a larger group of researchers: https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=22232