New Desk Rejection Practice for EMNLP 2025

For some time there has been substantial concern within the community regarding many aspects of reviewing, from poor quality, to too few reviewers in the pool, to poor quality reviews, to reviewers not even doing their reviews or resorting to AI generated reviews. In light of these circumstances, this year’s EMNLP PCs are taking reviewer responsibility very seriously as a step towards incentivizing more conscientious reviewer behavior.

In our communication with the community, we – the EMNLP 2025 PC chairs – have already indicated that desk rejections would be levied in the case of reviewer irresponsibility. As a first step, in this cycle, we are only desk-rejecting (and disallowing submission to the next ARR cycle) papers where at least one author met all the following criteria, as these represent severe violations of our reviewer policy https://2025.emnlp.org/reviewer-policies:

• They were assigned papers to review at the beginning of the review cycle (i.e. not emergency reviews).
• They were a reviewer with at least 3 assigned papers and failed to submit 100% of their reviews despite multiple reminders.
• They did not submit an Emergency declaration or a Delay notification. In future cycles, this effort will extend more broadly to include those with a reduced workload, or did some portion, but not enough, of what they were assigned. So be mindful in order to avoid suffering one or more desk rejections.

We hope that this measure will ultimately help improve the overall quality and consistency of reviews, benefiting both authors and the community as a whole.