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 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

[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>