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>