Antonis Anastasopoulos antonisa

The Impossible Task of Conference SACs/PCs or How I lost 3 Nights of Sleep

I am writing this post in order to share my thoughts on the processes behind acceptance/rejection decisions in top-tier (NLP) conferences. I'll first discuss the process and then share some thoughts on its shortcomings.

Before we start, a bit about me. I am an assistant professor (aka, rather junior: I have been in this position for less than 4 years, following my PhD studies and a short postdoc) working on NLP, with a focus on multilingualism and low-resource settings. While I have submitted, published at, and reviewed for *ACL conferences and workshops for many years, it was at EMNLP'23 that I was a Senior Area Chair (SAC) for the first time.

The Conference Paper Pipeline

Let's first briefly outline the process that a paper undergoes, from submission to decision:

	import re
	import urllib2
	import itertools
	import codecs

	def download(url):
	print "Downloading: ", url
	try:
	html = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
	except urllib2.URLError as e: