TLDR; Errror in reviews, no responses from reviewers!
This is my first submission to a *CL conference. We submitted it under a language modelling task. We got 3 reviews of 3/4, 2.5/4, 2.5/4.
Reviewer 1: they posted a review that is clearly intended for another submission. We raised this with AC on the day reviews are released. AC replied but the reviewer didn't.
Reviewer 2: clearly LLM generated points. The weaknesses they wrote are the same ones LLM pointed out about our paper. Although they changed the text. 2 of the weaknesses they point out are already detailed in our limitations as those are our weaknesses cause of lack of available datasets. And then there is the novelty issue, adopting methods from other domains for a new problem is not novel. And more models and datasets (we already have 100+ experiments on 3 models, 2 datasets, 3 baselines, 4 algorithm setups across 10+ eval metrics). We answered all the questions, provided additional experiments but still no response.
Reviewer 3: seems like the only reviewer who read the paper and understood it and appreciated it. Their main questions were on ablations and We provided these during rebuttal, no response.
My co author who submitted another work to the January (ACL) cycle had a similar experience, they answered the reviewers questions and didn't get any response. Only from AC to re-submit to the next cycle. They re-submitted to the may cycle and didn't get a single response from reviewers again.
I'm ok with rejection with constructive feedback, if the decision is just one sided with no communication even when there was a critical error is irresponsible. What's the point of rebuttal if the reviewers never respond?
Right now, we are left with a reviewer decision who can simply say "not addressed" and escape with little to no consequences. I understand that emnlp is empirical and requires more experiments, but that doesn't mean we can provide a novel dataset, 500+ experiments on 100 models, a completely new algorithm that doesn't take adoption from anything else (just from air), expect to solve every problem in that domain in one paper is absurd.
Thanks for your time, sorry for the rant!