An ARR submission bound for NAACL has four storage tiers with different review contracts, and misfiling material across them is a self-inflicted wound. The tiers, from strongest contract to weakest:
| Tier | Counted? | Reviewer obligation | Belongs here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content pages (8 long / 4 short) | Yes | Must read; sole basis of judgment | Claims, method, main results, decisive analysis |
| Limitations (+ optional ethics) | No | Read and audited | Real scope boundaries, risk discussion |
| Appendix (same PDF, after refs) | No | May consult | Full prompt sets, extra tables, proofs of preprocessing |
| Uploaded supplements (archives) | No | Discretionary | Code, data samples, guidelines, raw outputs |
The operating rule: a reviewer who reads only tier 1 must be able to accept the paper. If a claim's only support lives in tier 3 or 4, the claim is unsupported for decision purposes.
Papers on Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, or Indigenous American languages carry a cost English-only papers never pay: every example needs the original line, a gloss, and a translation — three lines where a monolingual paper spends one. Budget for it deliberately:
gb4e, expex) interact badly with
tight column budgets; test early, not the night before.The Limitations section costs no pages, and reviewers check whether the weaknesses they found appear in it. Write it as the paper's honest edge:
A Limitations section that predicts the reviews reads as mastery; one that lists "compute was limited" reads as filler.
Material moves between tiers as the paper evolves, and each direction has a rule:
# Pre-upload sweep of the supplement archive
unzip -l supp.zip | grep -Ei '\.git/|DS_Store|__pycache__|\.ipynb_checkpoints'
# Anonymity: usernames, lab paths, letterheads
unzip -p supp.zip '*.md' '*.py' '*.txt' | grep -nEi '/(home|Users)/[a-z]+|university|lab\b'
# Size and openability on a clean machine
du -h supp.zip && unzip -t supp.zip > /dev/null && echo OK
A 9.5-page draft on named-entity recognition for three code-switched pairs: the per-pair ablation grid (0.7 pages) moves to the appendix behind one summary row; four of six glossed examples move to an appendix gallery; the dialect-coverage caveat moves out of a footnote into Limitations where it is free; the annotation guidelines PDF and scoring scripts go to the upload tier. Result: 8.0 content pages, no claim orphaned outside tier 1.
[Tier map] <major item -> tier -> justified?>
[Orphaned claims] <claims supported only outside content pages>
[Gloss budget] <examples kept in body / moved / at risk>
[Limitations audit] <predicted objections covered?>
[Archive sweep] clean / findings