ACL Rolling Review cycles, explained

ACL Rolling Review is the shared reviewing system for the *ACL conferences. You submit to a cycle, get reviews and a meta-review, and then either commit the paper and its reviews to a conference or revise and resubmit to a later cycle.

• Commitment happens through a form set up by each venue's program chairs, before that venue's commitment deadline.
• The commitment deadline must fall within 6 months of your meta-review's release.
• ARR doesn't stop you committing to several venues at once. Each venue then contacts you with its own decision.

From the official ARR dates page, which currently lists cycles up to October 2026 and doesn't state a time zone. The ACL 2027 site gives the January cycle's deadline as Jan 4, 2027, AoE.

The last ARR cycle a venue accepts, and its commitment deadline:

• One general response to all reviews, plus one response per review, each at most 5,000 characters.
• Text only, posted as an OpenReview comment. No external links.
• New results only in direct response to a reviewer's question. Unsolicited new results aren't allowed; they belong in a resubmission.

• You can resubmit as many times as you like, to the next cycle or a later one.
• Include a PDF explaining the revisions, the link to the previous OpenReview submission, and whether you want the same or all-new reviewers.
• ARR tries to reassign the same reviewers if you ask, but some may be new. Asking for new reviewers is generally granted and isn't held against the paper.

• Work backwards from the venue: find its last accepted cycle and commitment deadline in the table above.
• Leave room for one resubmission if the first meta-review is weak. That usually means aiming one cycle earlier than the last possible one.
• Know the scales: Overall Assessment and Soundness run 1–5 in half points. A 3 argues for Findings and a 4 for the main conference.

Every field of the form is on the ARR review form page, and live countdowns are on the deadline tracker.