ACL Rolling Review (ARR) is a revolutionary way to submit papers to conferences, mimicking the journal style of publication with multiple rounds of reviews. With ARR, an author can submit a paper and get feedback multiple times, working to improve the quality of their manuscript for publication. ARR differs from direct conference submissions, the standard method of submitting papers to conferences, where direct submissions only receive a single round of reviews, after which a hard decision of ACCEPT or REJECT is made on the paper. Direct submissions can be extremely noisy, as was empirically demonstrated through The NeurIPS 2021 Consistency Experiment:

https://blog.neurips.cc/2021/12/08/the-neurips-2021-consistency-experiment/

Furthermore, direct submission rejections can be extremely demotivating for researchers, as they represent a certainty that the author's work will not appear at that conference.

Alternatively, journal submissions often go through multiple rounds of reviews, where the authors are asked to make major or minor revisions to their manuscript. While journals can be significantly less demotivating, they can take a very long time to go through multiple rounds of revisions (6-9+ months).

ARR provides a merger of the benefits of both direct and journal submission systems. More details can be found here:

https://aclrollingreview.org/authors

ACL, EACL, and NAACL 2024 will only allow paper submissions through the ARR system (https://aclrollingreview.org/), not allowing direct submissions at all. However, there are multiple reasons why ARR may not work as the sole method of submission, such as possible score inflation and a possible major impact on acceptance rates.

Will ACL conferences continue to utilize ARR as the sole method of submission in 2025? This question resolves to YES if all ACL conferences ONLY utilize ARR in 2025, and otherwise resolves to NO.