ACL Supplementary

Use this when splitting an ACL paper between body, appendix, and archive. The governing ARR principle: reviewers are not required to consider material in appendices or supplements, so anything decision-critical that lives only there is effectively invisible.

The ACL page anatomy

text
[ content pages: 8 long / 4 short ]   <- the reviewed argument lives here
[ Limitations (REQUIRED, unlimited) ] <- after conclusion, outside page count
[ Ethics statement (optional) ]
[ References (unlimited) ]
[ Appendices (unlimited, same PDF) ]  <- optional reading for reviewers
+ separate .tgz/.zip archive          <- software / data supplement

Missing Limitations is a desk-reject condition; treating it as one throwaway sentence is a review-stage penalty even when it passes the gate.

What must not leave the body

• The main results table and the headline comparison.
• Task definition and enough of the method that a reviewer can judge novelty.
• At least a summary of the error analysis — a pointer-only error analysis

reads as not having one.

• Human-evaluation design in one paragraph: raters, items, agreement.
• The experimental setup at reproduction-outline level; full grids can go down.

What appendices are good at

• Full prompt texts and few-shot exemplars (reference them per experiment).
• Complete hyperparameter tables and search ranges.
• Per-language / per-dataset breakdowns behind an averaged headline number.
• Annotation guidelines and interface screenshots.
• Extended qualitative examples and additional ablations.
• Proofs or derivations for the occasional formal result.

Limitations section that actually works

| Weak pattern | Stronger ACL pattern | |---|---| | "Results may not generalize" | Name the languages, domains, and model scales actually tested and the nearest untested regime | | "LLMs can hallucinate" | State which conclusions depend on a specific model snapshot and API behavior | | Silent on data | Note license constraints, demographic skew, or collection-window bias in the corpora used | | Written last-minute | Mirrors the risks reviewers will find anyway, defusing them on your terms |

ACL's policy explicitly instructs reviewers not to punish honest limitations, which makes this section the cheapest goodwill in the whole submission.

Archive rules and hygiene

• Upload software/data as .tgz or .zip in the OpenReview fields; personal

cloud-storage links are barred, and any external page must be anonymous and untracked.

• Strip authorship trails: git history, notebook metadata, absolute paths with

usernames, license headers, README contact lines.

• Test the archive on a clean machine: it must unpack, the README must state

what maps to which table, and nothing should require credentials just to read.

• Include model outputs where feasible so reviewers can verify scoring without

compute (see acl-reproducibility).

Body-vs-appendix vignette

A long paper introduces a retrieval-augmented QA method with results on six benchmarks in three languages. Body: method figure, main table (six benchmarks averaged + per-language block), two-paragraph error analysis, one ablation that carries the mechanism claim. Appendix: full per-benchmark tables, prompts, retrieval index details, remaining ablations, annotation guidelines for the human study. Archive: code, prompts as files, and all model outputs. The test: a reviewer who never scrolls past the references can still reconstruct and believe every claim in the abstract.

Appendix ordering convention that reviewers navigate well

• A: full experimental setup (models, hyperparameters, hardware, budgets).
• B: prompts and few-shot exemplars, one subsection per experiment.
• C: complete results — per-dataset, per-language, per-seed tables behind

every averaged number in the body.

• D: annotation materials — guidelines, interface, pay, agreement detail.
• E: additional analyses and ablations, each forward-referenced from the

body at least once (unreferenced appendix content is invisible).

• F: qualitative examples, marked as random or curated — say which.

Number tables and figures continuously with the body so the author response can cite "Table 9" unambiguously during the discussion phase.

Ethics statement: when to write one

Write it when the paper involves human subjects or annotators, scraped user-generated content, demographic inference, dual-use capability, or release of models/data with realistic misuse paths. Skip it when nothing applies — the Responsible NLP checklist already covers the routine cases, and a padded statement invites the very scrutiny it fails to answer. It shares the unlimited space after the conclusion with Limitations.

Size and dependency guardrails

• Keep the archive small enough to download on conference-hotel wifi;

reviewers abandon multi-gigabyte supplements unopened.

• No credentials, no API keys, no gated-model weights — describe access

paths instead of shipping secrets.

• Pin dependency versions in one environment file; "latest transformers"

is a different codebase every cycle.

• If data cannot be shared (license, privacy), include the loader code and

a synthetic sample with identical schema so scripts still run.

Output format

text
[Split status] sound / body-overloaded / appendix-dependent
[Limitations quality] substantive / ritual / missing
[Must-move-up] <decision-critical items currently below the fold>
[Archive check] <format/anonymity/clean-machine findings>
[Reviewer-blind spots] <claims visible only outside the body>