2019Q1 Reports: CL Journal

I have taken over as the CL Journal Editor-in-Chief on 15 July 2018.

In the past 6 months, we have received 75 first submissions and the average time to first decision for the papers first submitted (excluding desk rejects) was 88 days. It continues to be a challenge to find qualified reviewers with the right expertise who would respond in a reasonable time to accept to review papers and submit their reviews on time.

The journal has now developed a healthy pipeline of accepted and conditionally accepted papers to fill at least two upcoming issues (till September 2019). The total number of journal pages for the 4 issues September 2018 to June 2019 is 906. Among the accepted regular papers (excluding squibs and book reviews) in these 4 issues, the distribution of geographical regions of the first authors is as follows: 41% from the Americas, 36% from Europe, and 23% from Asia.

Unfortunately, a special issue on “Computational Approaches in Historical Linguistics after the Quantitative Turn”, with submission deadline of 15 July 2018, did not attract enough submissions to form a special issue. In total, only 8 papers were submitted to this special issue, out of which one paper has been accepted, another one is undergoing review, and the rest have been rejected.

Another special issue on “Multilingual and Interlingual Semantic Representations for Natural Language Processing” is in the pipeline, with an impending submission deadline of 21 March 2019. Marta R. Costa-jussà, Cristina España-Bonet, Pascale Fung, and Noah A. Smith are the guest editors of this special issue. We have added a timeline of the key events (submission, first notification, revised submission, final notification, and camera ready submission) to this special issue, and the accepted papers are expected to appear in the March 2020 issue of CL journal.

Hwee Tou Ng

15 March 2019