📢 2025 ARR Policy Updates: Key Changes & Implications

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The ACL Rolling Review (ARR) process is undergoing significant changes in 2025 to address concerns around review workload, decision reliability, and consistency with conferences. Here’s a summary of the key updates:

New Review Cycle: 5 Rounds Per Year

• Instead of monthly submissions, ARR will now have 5 review rounds per year.
• The planned review cycles for 2025 are February, May, July, October, and January 2026.
• This change aims to balance reviewer workload and submission volume while maintaining quality.

Meta Reviews to Decide Findings

• ARR will now make Findings decisions directly instead of passing the responsibility to conferences.
• This is expected to improve alignment between ARR and conference decision-making.
• However, concerns remain about reliability and the potential impact on acceptance rates.

Open Questions and Community Concerns

1️⃣ Reliability of ARR Meta Reviewers: Experiments at ACL 2025/EMNLP 2025 will assess decision consistency.

2️⃣ Acceptance Rate Changes: Current conferences accept ~35-40% of submissions. Higher acceptance via ARR might raise quality concerns.

3️⃣ Unified Findings Venue:

• Previously, Findings papers were associated with specific conferences, such as Findings of ACL, Findings of EMNLP, and Findings of NAACL.
• The proposed change would consolidate all Findings papers under a single umbrella venue (Findings of ACL).
• Potential benefits: Simplifies submission logistics and reduces ambiguity about which conference a Findings paper belongs to.
• Potential drawbacks: Findings papers would no longer be tied to prestigious main conferences (e.g., ACL, EMNLP), which could lower their perceived status and impact in the community. For example, in some academic institutions and funding agencies, having “Findings of ACL” may not be viewed as highly as “Findings of EMNLP” or “Findings of NAACL” due to differences in how venues are ranked.

What’s Next?

• The 5-cycle review system is confirmed for 2025.
• The Meta Review-driven Findings decision is still under discussion, with potential refinements based on feedback.
• Researchers should stay updated on ACL policy announcements to navigate submission strategies effectively.

Read more here: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/sites/default/files/COPR-5-cycle-report-to-publish.pdf

What do you think of these changes? Will they improve the review process, or create new challenges? Let’s discuss!