2020Q3 Reports: CL Journal Editor

Summary Statistics

During the past six months, the CL journal received 76 first submissions. The average time to first decision is 97 days.

The published CL papers of the last 4 issues (September 2019 to June 2020) comprise 11 regular papers, 5 special issue papers, 4 survey papers, 3 squib papers, and 4 book reviews. The total number of pages of these 4 issues is 946.

Special Issue

The June 2020 issue of the CL journal is a special issue on Multilingual and Interlingual Semantic Representations for Natural Language Processing. The special issue editors are Marta R. Costa-jussa, Cristina Espana-Bonet, Pascale Fung, and Noah A. Smith. We received 14 submissions to this special issue, and 5 papers were accepted.

Conference Presentation

CL journal papers are now eligible for presentation at one of the *ACL/EMNLP conferences. The first batch of 7 papers are to be presented at the ACL 2020 conference.

The ACL Executive Committee has decided that CL submissions will still undergo single-blind reviewing. There are two categories of submissions to CL journal:

1. Submissions containing new material not previously published: The authors of these submissions, once accepted, are given the option to present their accepted papers at one of the *ACL/EMNLP conferences.

2. Submissions which are extended version of past conference paper(s) or are survey papers: These submissions will not be presented at conferences.

Editorial Team

A team of standing reviewers has been recruited and they have been helping to review CL submissions. Currently, there are more than 80 standing reviewers.

CL journal is transitioning to an editorial board comprising action editors. The role of a CL action editor is similar to the role of an area chair in a conference. An action editor is responsible for assigning reviewers to a submission and recommending paper acceptance to the CL editor-in-chief. 24 action editors have joined the editorial board. The numbers of action editors and standing reviewers are expected to grow over time as the need arises. It is expected that the reviewing time will be shortened with the shift to a reviewing structure comprising action editors and standing reviewers.

Hwee Tou Ng 30 June 2020