ACL Author Response
Use this when ARR reviews land. The response is written inside the review cycle, before the meta-review is finalized — its primary reader is the area chair who will summarize your paper for whatever conference you later commit to. Reopen aclrollingreview.org/reviewing for the current cycle's exact window and rules.
What the response can actually move
- ARR assigns at least three reviewers; after the author response there is a reviewer-discussion phase in which reviewers are expected to update reviews. A response that gives a reviewer a concrete reason to revise is worth more than one that argues.
- The meta-review travels with the paper to commitment. Senior area chairs at the venue read the meta-review first, so your real goal is to shape what the AC writes, not to win a debate transcript.
- Scores are not the only currency: a meta-review that says "the main weakness was resolved in discussion" can rescue a committed paper that scores alone would sink.
Triage order
- Factual errors in reviews (wrong dataset, misread table, missed section).
- Misunderstandings a two-sentence clarification can dissolve.
- Requests satisfiable from submitted material — appendix tables, checklist answers, the supplement archive.
- Requests needing new experiments: promise only what is genuinely small, or explicitly defer to a revision cycle (ARR is built for resubmission).
- Taste disagreements: answer once, briefly, without heat.
NLP-reviewer objection patterns
| Objection | Underlying worry | Response that works at ACL |
|---|---|---|
| "Only evaluated on English" | Overclaimed generality | Scope the claim explicitly; cite the multilingual appendix run if one exists |
| "Gains may be contamination" | Test data in pretraining | Point to the decontamination check or concede and describe the planned audit |
| "No error analysis" | Numbers without understanding | Quote the analysis section or summarize 2-3 systematic error classes from logged outputs |
| "Human eval lacks agreement stats" | Unreliable judgments | Report the IAA already computed; never invent a number in the response box |
| "Missing recent baseline X" | Stale comparison set | Distinguish X technically, or accept it as revision work with a stated plan |
Rules of the response box
- Stay anonymous: no names, lab hints, grant numbers, or identifying links.
- Never claim results that are not in the submitted PDF, supplement, or checklist; ARR reviewers can and do check.
- Keep each reviewer reply skimmable — lead with the single sentence you want quoted in the meta-review.
- If a review is deficient (template text, wrong paper, LLM-generated, hostile), use the current cycle's review-issue flag to the AC rather than fighting it in the reply thread.
Respond now or resubmit later
- Respond in-cycle when the objections are misreadings or scoping problems — these are exactly what discussion can fix before the meta-review.
- Prefer withdrawing the commitment plan and revising for a later cycle when reviews identify real missing experiments; a resubmission must carry a point-by-point revision note anyway, so bank the work.
- Remember the asymmetry: reviews and meta-review persist and follow a resubmission. An abrasive response is permanent record.
Skeleton reply
textWe thank Reviewer X. Main point first: [one-sentence resolution]. 1. [Factual correction] The model is trained only on the training split (Section 3.2, line refs); Table 2 reports held-out results. 2. [Clarification] The claim is scoped to the five languages tested (Section 5); we will tighten the abstract wording. 3. [Evidence pointer] Seeds, prompts, and compute are in Appendix C and checklist items C1-C3. 4. [Deferred work] A comparison to X requires retraining; we commit to it in a revision and note why it should not change the ranking.
Tone calibration for the ARR record
- Write for three audiences at once: the reviewer being answered, the AC composing the meta-review, and the venue chairs who will skim the thread months later at commitment.
- Concede fast and specifically; a clean concession plus a scoped fix reads as competence, while minimizing a real weakness reads as evasion.
- Quantify wherever a reviewer hedged: replace "we believe the effect is robust" with the interval, the seed count, or the appendix table number.
- Do not thank effusively or argue emotionally; both waste the reader's attention budget in a thread they are legally required to skim.
- If two reviewers contradict each other, say so neutrally and let the AC arbitrate — pointing out the contradiction is legitimate and effective.
A workable 5-day response window
- Day 1: read all reviews twice; extract every distinct objection into a sheet with owner and evidence anchor; no drafting yet.
- Day 2: run any genuinely small verification (a re-scoring, a missing statistic already computable from logged outputs).
- Day 3: draft all replies; lead each with its one-sentence resolution.
- Day 4: internal cold read by a co-author who did not draft; cut 30%.
- Day 5: post early, not at the buzzer — reviewers who will engage in discussion tend to do it once, soon after your reply appears.
If the real answer is "withdraw and revise"
- Skipping the response entirely is a signal too — reviewers note silence in discussion, and the package records it. A short, gracious reply that acknowledges the substantive points costs little and keeps the record clean for the resubmission's mandatory revision note.
- Harvest the reviews immediately into the revision plan while the team still has context; the next cycle's point-by-point response is easiest to write as a running document, not a deadline reconstruction.
Output format
text[Response stance] clarify-in-cycle / concede-and-revise / mixed [Meta-review target] <sentence you want the AC to write> [Per-reviewer plan] <R1/R2/R3: main point + evidence anchor> [Review-issue flags] <deficient-review reports to AC, if any> [Deferred to resubmission] <experiments promised for a later cycle>
