Emerging trends: Too many submissions and too few qualified reviewers

Abstract There have been a number of disturbing posts on social media about large conferences. The good news is that we are past denial. There is agreement that reviewing is broken. Many posts mention toxicity. As a founder of EMNLP, it hurts to admit that there is so much toxicity that I can no longer support the process. I will continue to review for journals and smaller venues, but not for larger conferences until better ways are found to manage the crowds. Enough negativity. What can we do to be part of the solution? Many constructive suggestions have been proposed elsewhere and will be discussed here. Scale is the primary requirement. Traditional processes do not scale with exponential growth. Many attempts to fix the process (like ARR) make a bad situation worse by introducing additional bloat, while failing to address the primary requirement: scale. Process simplification will help. Steps should be removed unless they address the scaling challenge: (a) too many submissions and (b) too few qualified reviewers. A nomination process is proposed to address both (a) and (b).