ACL Ready: RAG Based Assistant for the ACL Checklist

Abstract: The ARR Responsible NLP Research checklist website states that the "checklist is designed to encourage best practices for responsible research, addressing issues of research ethics, societal impact and reproducibility." Answering the questions is an opportunity for authors to reflect on their work and make sure any shared scientific assets follow best practices. Ideally, considering the checklist before submission can favorably impact the writing of a research paper. However, the checklist is often filled out at the last moment. In this work, we introduce ACLReady, a retrieval-augmented LLM application that can be used to empower authors to reflect on their work and assist authors with the ACL checklist. To test the effectiveness of the system, we conducted a qualitative study with 13 users which shows that 92% of users found the application useful and easy to use as well as 77% of the users found that the application provided the information they expected. Our code is publicly available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license on GitHub.