Some friends told me that this year’s ARR May cycle, i.e., EMNLP 2026, seems to have much lower average scores than previous years.
If your scores are not very high, don’t panic too much. I’ve seen papers with a 2.5 meta-review score in ARR still get accepted by top ACL-family conferences when the AC liked the work.
Just move on, keep calm, and fingers crossed.