2018Q1 Reports: CL Journal

Computational Linguistics 2018 1st quarter report

Special Issues

The editorial board members of the journal had a conversation last year on how to make the journal more interesting and attract more readership. One of the many interesting ideas we came up with was the idea of making more use of Special Issues. Special issues develop hot topics and attract attention to new developing areas in a coherent way. Our field has had some memorable special issues, like the one in 1993 on corpus-based and statistical methods, edited by Susan Armstrong, that marked a turning point in our field.

Special issues are a double-edged sword, while they identify topics of interest in a community and define the ‘must read’ papers on a topic, they can also be limiting as everything that does not end up in the special issue is forgotten. Special issues also compete for the limited space in the journal, potentially squeezing out unsolicited papers. Unsolicited papers should always remain our primary goal as publications.

Despite these ambiguities, we have had the fortune of receiving several very interesting proposals for special issues, which have appeared or which have been accepted and will see the light in the next 18 months.

• Special issue on Formal Distributional Semantics, editors Aurelie Herbelot and Gemma Boleda, published as issue 42 :4 in December 2016.

• Special issue on the Language of Social Media, editors Maite Taboada, Diana Inkpen and Farah Benamara, to be published in 2018.

• Special issue on Computational approaches in historical linguistics after the quantitative turn, (editors Taraka Rama, Simon J. Greenhill, Harald Hammarström, Gerhard Jäger, Johann-Mattis List. Given the distance from the usual CL/NLP topics, in this case Richard Sproat has agreed to act as ’adjunct editor’ from the board.) Call is out and will be closed 15th of July 2018.

• A very interesting special issue is under discussion.

The closed or current special issues have received a good number of good papers and were able to keep the quality high in areas that are topical and that we hope will attract readership.

New Computational Linguistics editor search

The current editor's position ends on July 15th and the search for a new editor is underway and is making progress.