Skills Development Structuring Conference Submission Material

Structuring Conference Submission Material

v20260724
naacl-supplementary
A comprehensive guide for authors submitting to top-tier NLP conferences (like NAACL/ARR). It details how to strategically allocate material across different submission tiers—Core Content, Limitations, Appendix, and Supplementary Uploads—to ensure the main argument remains robust and fully supported, regardless of which parts reviewers are obligated to read.
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Overview

NAACL Supplementary

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.

The NAACL-specific space pressure: examples in other languages

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:

  • Keep two or three load-bearing glossed examples in the content pages — the ones your error analysis actually turns on.
  • Move the example gallery to the appendix, one pointer per phenomenon.
  • Never compress by dropping the gloss line; an unglossed example excludes every reviewer who does not read the language, which at a Nations-of-the-Americas venue is a strange own goal.
  • Interlinear-gloss LaTeX packages (gb4e, expex) interact badly with tight column budgets; test early, not the night before.

Limitations: uncounted but not unread

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:

  • which language varieties and domains the claims do not extend to;
  • resource asymmetries (a 7B model per language vs. one multilingual run);
  • annotation limits — single-dialect annotators, small agreement samples;
  • what the community-data terms prevented you from testing or releasing.

A Limitations section that predicts the reviews reads as mastery; one that lists "compute was limited" reads as filler.

Appendix construction discipline

  1. Every appendix section gets at least one forward reference from the content pages; unreferenced appendices are invisible.
  2. Order appendix sections by reference order, not by writing order.
  3. Tables that exist only to prove thoroughness (per-seed dumps, all-prompt grids) go last, clearly labeled as completeness material.
  4. Nothing decision-critical enters the appendix after the response window — reviewers scored the paper without it.

Tier migration during revision cycles

Material moves between tiers as the paper evolves, and each direction has a rule:

  • Promotion (appendix → body): legitimate any time before upload; after reviews, promote only what the response window discussed — reviewers scored the body they read.
  • Demotion (body → appendix): the standard compression move; leave a one-line summary plus pointer at the original location so the argument's spine stays visible.
  • Resubmission reshuffles: if a prior cycle's reviewer ignored appendix evidence, the fix is usually promotion plus a change-summary line saying so — not a complaint that the evidence existed.
  • Never migrate silently between the reviewed version and camera-ready: the tier map of the accepted paper is part of what was accepted.

Upload-tier packaging check

# 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

Allocation walkthrough

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.

Output format

[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
Info
Category Development
Name naacl-supplementary
Version v20260724
Size 5.1KB
Updated At 2026-07-28
Language