ACL Conference Reviewer Awards Policy

This document proposes a standard protocol for reviewer awards at ACL conferences. The goal of introducing the policy is to have a consistent approach that suits the scale of our conferences today. It is designed to provide positive incentives for great service by volunteer reviewers and area chairs.

Award Types

There are typically three volunteer roles in the *ACL reviewing process: reviewers, area chairs, senior area chairs. There are corresponding awards for each of these roles:

• Great reviewers: nominated by the area chairs;
• Great area chairs: nominated by the senior area chairs;
• Great senior area chairs: nominated by the program chairs.

Award Criteria

\*\* Great reviewers. ** All reviewers are expected to follow the review guidelines and perform all their tasks on time. Above that, the area chairs may nominate the 'great' reviewers for a number of criteria, including but not limited to the following:

• rigorous reviewers, e.g. when the reviewer examines the provided code, data, or references, and reports hard-to-spot issues, or invests significant effort into learning a new technique to perform a better review;
• emergency reviewers, done on short notice but with very high quality;
• champion reviewers, who helped to rescue a paper from an unfair negative review;
• engaged reviewers, who engaged in an unusually thoughtful discussion with either the authors or other reviewers, especially when that improved the assessment of the paper;
• open-minded reviewers, who significantly changed their mind and assessment in the light of evidence brought by the authors or other reviewers;
• patient reviewers, who were able to provide unusually kind and helpful feedback even to low-quality submissions.