/acl-author-response

name: acl-author-response
description: Use when drafting an ACL author response inside an ACL Rolling Review cycle on OpenReview, covering the response window before meta-review, reviewer discussion dynamics, score-change strategy, flagging review issues to the area chair, anonymity rules, and deciding between responding now versus revising for a later ARR cycle.

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

1. Factual errors in reviews (wrong dataset, misread table, missed section). 2. Misunderstandings a two-sentence clarification can dissolve. 3. Requests satisfiable from submitted material — appendix tables, checklist answers, the supplement archive. 4. Requests needing new experiments: promise only what is genuinely small, or explicitly defer to a revision cycle (ARR is built for resubmission). 5. 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

We 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

1. **Day 1**: read all reviews twice; extract every distinct objection into a sheet with owner and evidence anchor; no drafting yet. 2. **Day 2**: run any genuinely small verification (a re-scoring, a missing statistic already computable from logged outputs). 3. **Day 3**: draft all replies; lead each with its one-sentence resolution. 4. **Day 4**: internal cold read by a co-author who did not draft; cut 30%. 5. **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 mandator