The ACL is seeking nominations (self-nominations are permitted and encouraged), for a co-Editor-in-Chief (henceforth “EiC”, with the “co-” understood) of the journal Transactions of the ACL (TACL), serving a three-year term. The successful candidate should be able to start in the beginning of 2024 (or as early as possible).
TACL is a rapidly growing, premier journal in the area of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing published by MIT Press, now indexed in both Scopus and Web of Science. It is distinguished by its monthly submission deadline, fast turn-around, and reviewing structure that involves a dedicated reviewing pool and a large team of action editors. Authors of TACL publications are customarily invited to present their work at a major ACL conference (see https://www.transacl.org for details). The regularly-posted TACL reports to the ACL Exec, available at https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/about/history, may be consulted for submission and decision statistics and more details of prior activities, as can current and past TACL EiCs: Asli Celikyilmaz (2023-2025), Roi Reichart (2022-2025), Ani Nenkova (2019–2024), Brian Roark (2018–2022), Mark Johnson (2016–2020), Lillian Lee (2014–2019), Kristina Toutanova (2016–2018), Michael Collins (2012–2015), and Dekang Lin (2012–2014).
TACL is led by a team of three EiCs that, with the help of an Editorial Assistant (paid by the ACL for effort of roughly one day a week), collaboratively oversees the entire journal. Duties include:
assignment of each monthly round of submissions to action editors (should be completed by the 7th of that month; this takes approximately 10+ hours, but the current arrangement among the EiCs is to alternate which months they are in charge of);
day-to-day management and oversight of the journal's operations, including supervising the reviewing process, providing advice and direction where appropriate, interacting with the ACL Anthology and our publisher, MIT Press, regarding publication and archiving, handling queries, and troubleshooting and settling issues as they arise;
recruiting reviewers and action editors for TACL's reviewer pool;
interacting with *ACL conference Program Chairs and the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) to handle potentially duplicate submissions and arrange conference presentations for TACL authors;
providing semiannual reports to the ACL Executive Committee (the “Exec”) and the reporting to the community at ACL business meetings.
The ideal candidate would have broad knowledge and interests across the whole field of computational linguistics and natural language processing; have interest in and facility with formulating reviewing and publication policy, given that the submission/reviewing/publication/preprint ecosystem in our community may be said to currently be in a state of flux; be able to interact fruitfully with a wide range of people, including researchers (authors, reviewers, action editors, conference program chairs), publisher staff, and software-support staff; and be effective in working closely with the other TACL EiC staff.
Being a TACL Editor-in-Chief is a major, ongoing commitment, requiring many hours each month, beyond that spent in paper-assignment. Nonetheless, contributing to the ACL community by working with colleagues on TACL is very rewarding. Discussions are open and constructive, and debates are resolved in a friendly and rigorous manner. The current TACL EiCs think that being part of the broader TACL community, including AEs, reviewers and authors, is a wonderful experience—beyond and above the opportunity to foster the growth and development of TACL and the areas it represents.
TACL and the ACL recognize the value and importance that diverse perspectives bring to our research and to our community. TACL strives to create an atmosphere of inclusiveness and respect for the many communities that support and enable TACL to exist and to thrive. We are firmly committed to continued recruitment and retention of authors, reviewers, action editors and EiCs from historically underrepresented groups in our journal and our field.
Nomination procedures
Nominations should be submitted via email to the search committee chair, Jan Hajic, hajic [at] ufal.mff.cuni.cz, with a Cc: to Emily M. Bender ebender [at] uw.edu, by December 15, 2023, subject line “Nomination for TACL co-EiC”, and should contain the following information:
Name, email address, and website of the nominee
If not a self-nomination, confirmation that the nominee is willing to serve (a dated excerpt of an email from the nominee suffices); if a self-nomination, a statement affirming willingness to serve
Statement of nominee’s goals/vision for TACL and/or relevant prior experience and/or reasons for interest in the position. Length of statement is up to the nominator, but 1 paragraph may suffice and more than 4 paragraphs is not anticipated to be necessary.
Nominations will be acknowledged by reply email; should acknowledgment not be received within 3 days, please resend your email.
The search committee, which was put together by the ACL Exec, will evaluate the nominations and make decisions in coordination with the Exec, after which the search committee chair will contact the selected nominee via email.
Besides the chair, Jan Hajic, the search committee members are: Asli Celikymaz and Roi Reichart, current TACL Editors-in-Chief; and Hwee Tou Ng, Anna Korhonen, Yusuke Miyao and Colin Cherry.