ACL Artifact Evaluation

ACL Artifact Evaluation

Use this to plan the evidence package around an ACL paper. ACL has no separate artifact-badge track; instead, artifact scrutiny is folded into review through the supplement archive and Section B ("scientific artifacts") of the Responsible NLP checklist, which reviewers cross-check against the PDF.

What counts as an artifact here

• Code: training/inference scripts, evaluation harnesses, prompt templates.
• Data: new corpora, annotations, filtered subsets of existing corpora, test suites, adversarial sets.
• Model outputs: generations, ranked lists, logits used in analysis — often the cheapest way to make an LLM paper checkable without GPUs.
• Human-subject materials: annotation guidelines, interface screenshots, consent text, compensation description.

Submission-time packaging rules

• Supplements upload as .tgz/.zip through the OpenReview form; links to tracked cloud storage are not acceptable, and any linked page must be anonymous.
• Scrub identity everywhere reviewers can look: file paths, git metadata, notebook author fields, license headers, dataset hosting pages, README contact lines.
• Reviewers are not required to open supplements. The paper plus checklist must stand alone; the archive is for verification, not for essential content.

Checklist items your artifact must satisfy

Checklist answers contradicted by the archive read as misleading information — grounds for desk rejection under ARR policy, and a credibility wound even when not enforced.

What an ACL reviewer opens first

1. The README — it has roughly one minute to orient them.
2. Prompt files and evaluation scripts, for any LLM claim: exact prompts, decoding parameters, and scoring code are the reproduction spine.
3. Annotation guidelines, for any dataset or human-eval claim: reviewers judge whether the labels could possibly mean what the paper says.
4. A sample of the data itself — quality problems visible in twenty random examples have sunk otherwise strong resource papers.

Vignette: packaging a multilingual benchmark submission

A hypothetical paper releases a 7-language reading-comprehension test suite built from news text plus a baseline evaluation of five LLMs.

• Ship per-language provenance: source, license, collection window, and the filtering pipeline as runnable code, since "web text" alone fails checklist item B on documentation.
• Include annotator guidelines, pay, recruitment channel, and agreement statistics; multilingual annotation quality is the first attack surface.
• Provide the exact prompts and outputs for all five models so reviewers can re-score without API keys.
• Keep a versioned, hash-stamped test file so post-publication contamination can be audited later.

Release ladder after acceptance

anonymous supplement  ->  public repo + dataset page  ->  archived, versioned release
   (review-time)          (camera-ready links)            (DOI/hub artifact, cited version)

Post-acceptance, register the artifact where your community actually looks (model/dataset hubs, a maintained repo), state the license explicitly, and put the citation-of-record (the Anthology entry) in the README.

Anonymization sweep, concretely

Run these before zipping, on a copy:

# authorship trails in code and docs
grep -ri "yourname\|yourlab\|university" . --include="*.py" --include="*.md"
# git history and remotes leak owners
rm -rf .git; # or re-init a fresh repo for the archive copy
# notebook metadata carries usernames and kernel paths
jupyter nbconvert --clear-output --inplace *.ipynb
# absolute paths in configs and logs
grep -r "/home/\|/Users/" . | head

Then check the parts tools miss: license headers naming the lab, dataset hosting pages with institutional branding, model cards listing maintainers, and README badges pointing at owner-named CI.

Sizing and format sanity

• Keep the archive lean: strip checkpoints reviewers cannot load anyway, cached datasets, and virtualenvs; describe big assets and provide them at camera-ready instead.
• One top-level README, one environment file, one entry point per claimed result — reviewers grant roughly a minute before giving up.
• Verify the .zip/.tgz opens on a machine that has never seen the project; OpenReview upload limits and accepted fields vary by cycle, so check the live form rather than last cycle's.

Output format

[Artifact role] anonymous supplement / camera-ready release / public benchmark
[Contents] <code/data/prompts/outputs/guidelines>
[Checklist alignment] <Section B items satisfied vs missing>
[Anonymity findings] <paths/metadata/hosting leaks>
[Release plan] <post-acceptance registry, license, versioning>