After this lesson, you will be able to: Navigate peer review: ARR submission, how reviews and meta-reviews work, writing an effective author response (rebuttal), and SRW mentorship.
Submission is the start of a process, not the end. This lesson covers what happens after you submit through ACL Rolling Review, how to read reviews without despair, and how to write a rebuttal that actually changes scores.
You submit to ARR (with your paper, the Responsible NLP checklist, and often a 'limitations' and 'reproducibility' acknowledgment). The paper is assigned reviewers and an Area Chair who writes a meta-review summarizing them. Reviewers score along axes (soundness, excitement/contribution, and an overall recommendation) and write comments. After reviews, there is an author response (rebuttal) period. Then you 'commit' the reviewed paper to a venue (e.g. an SRW), where a final accept/reject decision is made using the ARR reviews. Cycles are monthly, so a paper that needs work can be revised and resubmitted.
Reviews can be blunt and sometimes wrong or based on a misreading. Separate the signal (a real weakness in your evaluation, a missing baseline) from the noise (a reviewer who skimmed). Common substantive critiques map directly onto this track: weak baseline, possible contamination, no significance testing, missing ablation, over-claiming, thin Limitations. If multiple reviewers raise the same point, it is real. The emotional skill, not taking it personally and using it to improve the work, is as important as the technical one.
The SRW is designed to be gentler than the main track: accepted authors get a senior mentor for feedback, the bar is calibrated for early-career work, and the non-archival track lets you present work-in-progress without committing it to the permanent record. Use the mentor: they will catch framing and evaluation issues a reviewer would have penalized. Even a rejection here usually comes with usable feedback, which is the point of the venue.
Treating a harsh review as the end rather than as a revision list. Writing a defensive rebuttal that argues instead of addressing concerns. Ignoring a reviewer's reproducible/runnable request you could have satisfied. Not running the one extra experiment that would flip a borderline score. Missing that reviewers consistently flagged the same weakness (the real signal). Forgetting that ARR is a cycle, so a near-miss is a revise-and-resubmit, not a dead end.
Pick the most effective response.
Sign in and purchase access to unlock this lesson.