Eacl submission

EACL Submission

Run this audit before uploading to the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) cycle that feeds your target EACL edition. EACL papers are never submitted to the conference directly: they enter an ARR cycle on OpenReview, collect reviews and a meta-review, and are later committed to EACL, which decides main / Findings / reject. Reopen the current EACL CFP and aclrollingreview.org/cfp before trusting any number below.

The one-cycle reality (EACL's defining trap)

• Confirm which single ARR cycle feeds your edition, and treat it as unrepeatable. For EACL 2027 the organizers named the August 3, 2026 cycle the only viable cycle — the conference sits early in the year, so there is no later cycle to slip into. Unlike ACL, a missed or wasted cycle here loses the whole edition.
• The ARR deadline is the hard one. Commitment is a separate, later step (October 11, 2026 for EACL 2027) — see eacl-workflow.
• With no fallback, a thin-but-submittable draft is a real dilemma: submitting burns the only cycle, skipping loses the year. Decide deliberately, not by deadline reflex.

Format gate

• Long papers: up to 8 content pages. Short papers: up to 4. Both get unlimited pages for references and appendices, plus unlimited space after the conclusion for the required Limitations section and an optional ethics statement.
• A missing Limitations section or overlength content is an explicit desk-reject condition under the ARR CFP — the most common self-inflicted rejection.
• Use the official ACL LaTeX/Word style files unmodified; margin, font, or spacing tampering is treated as a length violation and can be rejected without review.
• Appendices go after references in the same PDF; reviewers are not obliged to read them, so the 8 or 4 content pages must carry the whole argument.

Anonymity gate

• The submission must be fully anonymized: no names, affiliations, acknowledgements, or self-revealing "in our prior work we showed" citations.
• Since January 2024 there is no anonymity period: a non-anonymous preprint is allowed at any time. But declare preprint status at submission; choosing "no non-anonymous preprint" earns award eligibility and borderline priority — then posting one anyway before meta-review release is a desk-reject offense.
• Supplementary archives, repo links, and dataset pages must be anonymized too; links to personally identifying hosting are disallowed.

Declarations that gate the ARR form

Form item	What ARR checks	Failure mode
Responsible NLP checklist	Completed, consistent with the PDF	Misleading answers → desk reject
Resubmission link	Prior ARR submission ID + change summary	Unacknowledged resubmission → desk reject
Preprint declaration	Matches what is actually on arXiv	Broken "no preprint" pledge → desk reject
Dual submission	Not under review anywhere archival	Violation → reject at ARR or EACL
AI assistance disclosure	Checklist item answered honestly	Undisclosed generative-AI use → policy breach

Long vs short

A short paper is a genre, not a truncated long paper: one claim, four pages. A compressed eight-page study reads as thin (see the fastText exemplar in ../../resources/exemplars/library.md). See eacl-topic-selection for the full choice.

Final-72-hours sequence for an NLP paper

1. Rebuild the PDF from the untouched style files and re-run the page count on content pages only.
2. Re-read Limitations: it must be substantive (languages, data, compute, scope), not a ritual paragraph.
3. Fill the Responsible NLP checklist against the actual PDF — every "yes" needs a section number.
4. Sweep the supplement archive for author names in paths, notebook metadata, git history, and license headers.
5. Confirm the OpenReview title/abstract match the PDF and the preprint declaration matches arXiv reality.
6. Submit hours early; ARR deadlines are AoE but OpenReview outages are not an accepted excuse, and there is no next cycle.

Frequently mishandled cases

• Assuming a fallback cycle exists. For a single-cycle edition it does not; plan as if this is the only attempt.
• Appendix used as overflow body. Content pages must carry the argument; "see Appendix B" for a core mechanism fails self-containedness.
• arXiv v2 posted mid-cycle after declaring no preprint: a desk-reject liability.
• Dataset "available on request": allowed, but checklist answers must then explain reproduction honestly rather than imply release.

Output format

[ARR readiness] Ready / Needs fixes / Not ready
[Cycle plan] <single viable cycle -> EACL edition; fallback = none>
[Format gate] <length/Limitations/style-file findings>
[Anonymity + declarations] <checklist/preprint/resubmission/dual-submission findings>
[Desk-reject risks] <ranked list>
[Fix order] <what to change before the one cycle deadline>