brycewang-stanford NAACL Camera Ready
Acceptance at NAACL produces a permanent object: an open-access paper in the ACL Anthology under the chapter's proceedings (or under Findings of NAACL). The camera-ready phase is where the anonymous ARR artifact, the promises made in your author response, and your public identity get merged into that object. Historical anchor: NAACL 2025 set a single final-version deadline of February 8, 2025 covering both Main and Findings; always reconfirm the current edition's date and instructions.
The three-source merge
Reconstruct the final paper from three inputs, in this order:
- The reviewed PDF — the text the committee actually accepted.
- The promise ledger — every "we will clarify/add/rescope at camera-ready" sentence from your response and the meta-review's requests.
- De-anonymization — author block, acknowledgements, funding, real artifact URLs, and first-person self-citation where it reads better.
Work from a diff against the reviewed version. Silent substantive additions that reviewers never saw are the classic camera-ready foul; the extra page exists to honor the ledger, not to smuggle in a new experiment.
*ACL convention grants accepted papers one additional content page (long papers to 9, short to 5) precisely for integrating reviewer-driven changes — confirm the current edition's instructions rather than assuming.
De-anonymization with an Americas accent
NAACL papers frequently owe debts that anonymization suppressed: language consultants, speaker communities, data-sharing agreements with institutions in Latin America, translation help. Restoring these is not decoration — data-use agreements often require named credit, and omitting it can breach the terms under which a corpus was shared. Sweep for:
- consultant and community acknowledgements tied to specific datasets;
- grant and agency numbers (including non-U.S. funders) in required formats;
- artifact links flipped from anonymized mirrors to the permanent, licensed repository — then click every one from a logged-out session.
Metadata: the part search engines keep forever
| Field | Checked against | Frequent failure |
|---|---|---|
| Title in submission form | Title in the PDF | Casing drift; math or diacritics mangled |
| Author names | Each author's preferred spelling | Accents stripped (García → Garcia) — especially painful at this venue |
| Author order | The accepted submission | Unagreed reordering at the deadline |
| Abstract | Final PDF abstract | Old-cycle abstract pasted in |
| PDF text layer | Copy-paste of the title and quotes | Ligature/encoding damage from a bad toolchain |
The Anthology renders names with full Unicode; the fix for a stripped accent takes one minute now and a correction request months later.
Findings-specific handling
A Findings acceptance publishes identically (Anthology, open access, citable) but presentation rights differ by edition — some years offer poster slots or workshop presentation matching. Do not guess: read the decision letter, answer the presentation-preference form, and update the paper's own footer or citation guidance to say "Findings of NAACL" so downstream citations land in the right volume.
Logistics checklist for the host city
[ ] Registration completed under the presenting author's name
[ ] Visa/ESTA lead time checked for the host country (US, Mexico,
or elsewhere in the Americas — requirements differ sharply
by author nationality; start immediately at acceptance)
[ ] Presentation format confirmed: oral / poster / Findings slot
[ ] Travel grants: chapter and conference D&I programs have
deadlines separate from camera-ready — check both
[ ] Artifact repository public before the talk, not after
Final-week failure catalog
Recurring self-inflicted wounds in the last days before the final-version deadline, in descending frequency:
- The promise ledger applied from memory instead of from the actual response text — reviewers notice the one promised clarification that never landed.
- A de-anonymization pass that restores authors but forgets the anonymized
repository placeholder, shipping
anonymous.4open.scienceinto the permanent record. - The extra content page treated as license for a new subsection of results nobody reviewed.
- Acknowledgements added without checking the data agreement's required attribution wording — close is not compliant for partnership credits.
- Rebuilding with the final style switch and never re-reading page breaks, so a table straddles the new author block.
- Uploading a PDF whose embedded title metadata still says "Anonymous ACL submission."
Each of these is a two-minute check now and a proceedings-correction request later; the Anthology does process errata, but a corrected PDF never fully overwrites the copies already downloaded.
Ordered final pass
- Apply the promise ledger; diff against the reviewed PDF.
- Restore identity, acknowledgements, and live artifact links.
- Verify metadata fields and Unicode rendering one by one.
- Rebuild with the final-version style switch; recheck page budget.
- Upload early; keep the confirmation email and the exact final PDF.
Output format
[Merge status] <ledger items applied / deferred / dropped-with-reason>
[Identity restore] <authors, acks, funding, links — done/pending>
[Metadata audit] <field -> ok/fixed>
[Findings handling] n/a / presentation plan
[Logistics] <registration, visa, travel-grant deadlines>