Reviewer Code of Conduct

We ask the reviewers for COLING 2018 to adhere to the following code of conduct. (This has also been sent to the reviewers via email, but for transparency’s sake we post it here as well.)

Reviewer Code of Conduct

As you prepare your reviews, keep in mind that our goal with the review forms is to help reviewers structure their reviews in such a way that they are helpful for the area chairs in making final acceptance decisions, informative for the authors (so they understand the decisions that were made), and helpful for the authors (as they improve their work either for camera ready, or for submission to a later venue). To that end, we ask you to follow these guidelines as you prepare your reviews:

Be timely: Even if you don’t plan to start your reviews as soon as they are assigned, please do log in to START and see which papers you got. This will allow you to notify us of conflicts of interest in time for us to reassign the paper. Furthermore, please don’t count on finishing your reviews at the last minute. As we all know, things can come up, and that time you were counting on might not be there. As we coordinate the efforts of 1200+ PC members, it is imperative that everyone be timely.

Be constructive: Be sure to state what you find valuable about each paper, even if this is difficult to do. There’s a person on the other end of your review, who has put thought and effort into their paper. Your suggestions for improvement will be better received if the author can also see that you understood what they were trying to do. Normative statements (e.g. “insufficient evaluation”) are much more valuable to both authors and chairs when there are supporting explanations, so include them.

Be thorough: Read both the review forms and your papers carefully and provide detailed comments. We ask for scores on specific dimensions because we want you to consider those dimensions as you evaluate the paper. But ultimately, your comments will be more helpful, both to the ACs and to the authors, than the numerical scores. So please comment on each of the points as well in the text of your review. Note, too, that we have quite different review forms for different paper types, because we believe that different paper types should be evaluated in (somewhat) different ways (e.g. a position paper shouldn’t be criticized for not including an evaluation section). Please look at the review form before reading the paper so you know what you are looking for.

Maintain confidentiality: As a professional researcher, we have confidence you already know that this entire process is confidential, and how to treat it that way. Do not share the papers you review discuss their contents with others. Do not appropriate the ideas in the paper.

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