New TACL Appendices Policy

Effective March 1, 2024

Recognizing the increasing volume of experiments in our community, TACL announces a new appendices policy, aiming to balance reproducibility with conciseness and clarity. Starting with the March 1^st submission cycle, TACL will allow papers submitted to the journal to contain appendices that follows these guidelines:

Allowable Content Type in the appendices:

1. Pre-processing decisions, model parameters, feature templates, lengthy proofs or derivations, pseudocode, sample system inputs/outputs (including prompts), annotator guidelines, URLs  and other details that are necessary for the exact replication of the work described in the paper.
2. Complementary results: Tables and figures that complement the results of the main paper and are explicitly referred to from the main paper.

No free text will be allowed in the appendices unless it specifically adds more details of Category#1 above.

TACL Guidelines for appendices

1. Number of appendix pages allowed: Category#1 (above): up to 5 pages; Category#2 (above): up to 3 pages
2. Appendices should be devoid of an author identifiers.
3. Appendices will not be reviewed. 
4. Appendices should appear after the references.
5. The EiCs and AEs will verify the page limit of the appendices; if the pages exceed the limit, the paper will be rejected or returned to the author for resubmission at the submission cycle. 
6. The number of content pages will remain 10 for an original submission.  (Exception:  Resubmissions (C-decision and B-decision papers), are often allowed two more pages for content, the number of pages for appendices still stands as detailed above.).
7. The time to review will remain the same.

The appendices must adhere to the same rules and guidelines as the standard content of the paper. This includes maintaining consistency in style, ensuring anonymity, and following any other submission guidelines provided.

In any submission phase, the main paper and the appendices will be put together in a single PDF file, with the appendices following the references.

Of note, MIT Press strongly prefers to publish unreviewed appendices as separate files from their related articles.  Therefore, while authors of accepted papers can upload the complete paper (main paper plus appendices) as one file on arXiv, MIT Press will publish two separate files (one for the main paper, one for the appendices) on their journal page.