Submitting ARR Papers to EACL: Do You Need to Revise Before Committing?

Background

The ACL Rolling Review (ARR) process confuses many researchers. One researcher posted a specific question on Reddit: when preparing to commit an ARR paper to EACL, the system asks for a PDF upload. Should this PDF be a revised version incorporating reviewer feedback, or the original submission?

This confusion is quite common. The original poster had assumed that committing only required submitting a review link, but the system actually requires a PDF upload, which makes the workflow less than obvious. The reviewers had only suggested minor revisions — so is it worth addressing them at the commitment stage, or should everything be saved for the camera-ready version after acceptance?

The Core Logic of ARR Commitment

ARR (ACL Rolling Review) is a rolling review system used by ACL-affiliated conferences. Papers first go through an independent review process to receive evaluations, after which authors can "commit" their reviewed papers to a specific venue (such as EACL, ACL, EMNLP, etc.). This design decouples "peer review" from "publication venue," improving the reuse efficiency of reviewing resources.

At the commitment stage, the positioning of the submitted PDF is a key question. Generally speaking, the version submitted at commitment time should be the one authors want Area Chairs and the program committee to see. If revisions have already been made in response to reviewer comments, reflecting those improvements in this version can help demonstrate the paper's completeness and the authors' responsiveness.

ARR was launched by ACL in 2021 to address the wasted reviewing effort inherent in traditional conference submission models. In the traditional model, if a paper is rejected by one venue, authors must resubmit to the next and go through a full review cycle again, leading to redundant work for reviewers. ARR fixes the review cycle at a rolling two-month cadence. Once a paper receives reviews, that evaluation record can be used multiple times within its validity period to commit to different target venues without triggering a new review. During each commitment window, authors can submit the paper along with the review record, author response, and revision notes to the target venue's program committee, which then makes the final acceptance decision based on the existing reviews. Understanding this mechanism helps clarify that the commitment-stage PDF is not a "resubmission" — it is a way of showing the program committee the paper's current state, building on the existing review record.

Should You Revise Before Committing?

To address the original question, it helps to think through the process design:

Commitment Version vs. Camera-Ready Version

The PDF submitted at commitment is not the same as the final camera-ready version. Camera-ready is the final manuscript prepared for typesetting and publication after formal acceptance — that is the appropriate time to fully address all reviewer comments, add experiments, or refine wording.

The commitment-stage PDF, by contrast, is meant to present the highest-quality manuscript possible so that the program committee can make an informed acceptance decision. For "minor" issues raised by reviewers, if they can be addressed easily before committing, incorporating them into a revised version is a reasonable approach — it can only help, and may improve the committee's impression of the paper.

Camera-ready versions have strict formatting requirements in academic publishing workflows: authors must finalize the manuscript using the conference's designated template (typically the ACL Anthology format), including complete author information, acknowledgments, an ethics statement, and a signed copyright agreement. Camera-ready deadlines typically fall 2–4 weeks after acceptance notifications, after which the paper enters the editorial production process and substantive content changes are generally no longer accepted. As a result, the commitment stage and the camera-ready stage differ significantly in timeline, scope of revisions, and formatting requirements. The commitment stage is more like a "final showcase opportunity" — authors can improve content under anonymous submission formatting without needing to follow publication typesetting standards. Conflating the two stages creates unnecessary time pressure, or leads to incorrectly postponing lightweight improvements that could have been made before committing.

Practical Recommendations

• If the revisions are genuinely minor (e.g., typos, clarifications, additional citations), fixing them in the commitment version is usually the safe and sensible choice.
• If the changes are substantial (e.g., new experiments, restructured sections), weigh the time cost — these can generally be deferred to the camera-ready stage.
• At commitment time, the system retains both the review link and the PDF, meaning the committee can see both the original review record and your current submission.

Why This Confusion Arises

The original poster's confusion stems from conflating two distinct "versions" in the process: the version that went through review, and the version submitted at commitment. The ARR system allows authors to upload a new PDF at commitment time, giving them an opportunity to improve the paper — but this also leads some researchers to mistakenly believe they must complete all revisions at this stage.

In practice, there is no requirement to address all reviewer comments before committing. The key is to judge: make improvements that are low-effort and high-impact before committing; leave the more labor-intensive changes for after acceptance.

Summary and Recommendations

For researchers facing the same confusion, keep the following principle in mind: the PDF submitted at commitment should be your best current version. Minor reviewer suggestions are worth addressing right away; major revisions can wait until camera-ready. The review link is submitted alongside the commitment, so the committee will have access to the full review history — there is no need to worry that revisions will obscure the original evaluation.

One important note: specific ARR policies may vary slightly across venues and submission cycles. The most authoritative reference is always the official submission guidelines published by the target conference. When in doubt about any procedural question, consulting the official documentation or reaching out to the program committee directly is the most reliable approach.