This year we celebrated the 25th volume of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (JNLE): twenty-five years of history in which John Tait played a crucial role as journal founder and, later, executive editor. Today, we give special thanks to John who is resigning from his role as one of the editors (see below).
Volume 25 included a special anniversary issue, 25.6, featuring anniversary papers which reflected on the field of Natural Language Engineering during the last 25 years as a whole or on a specific topic of the field. The papers in 25.6, along with other anniversary papers published in other issues of the anniversary Volume 25, are being put together as a virtual special issue. As part of Volume 25, we also had two special issues – Representation of Sentence Meaning and Natural Language Processing for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects.
The Journal of Natural Language Engineering has enjoyed another very successful year. The impact factor of the journal has increased again, reflecting the high quality of the journal. For 2018 and 2019, we had a total of 389 submissions with an acceptance rate of 17.48%.
Both the Industry Watch (IW) and Emerging Trends (ET) columns (led by the master columnists Robert Dale and Ken Church, respectively) continue to be inspirational, attracting diverse and worldwide readership, and are indeed real assets to the journal. In fact, we have agreed with Robert Dale that one of his IW pieces will be the “Review of the Year” in that it will summarise the highlights of Industrial NLP, always featuring in Issue number 1 (or the issue planned to come out closest to the New Year) of each volume. I welcome Robert’s first such piece, “Voice Assistance in 2019”, in this issue.
I would also like to welcome the new members of the Editorial Board who joined in 2019: Xiaojun Wan, Min Zhang and Jing Jiang, all of them experts in Deep Learning to reflect the latest trends of the field and representing China, Singapore and Asia more generally. I would like to seize this opportunity to thank all members of the Editorial Board for their valuable input. I would also like to introduce my new Editorial Assistants Rocío Caro Quintana and Branislava Šandrih who, along with Sara Može, Maria Kunilovskaya, and Sandra Elfiky, deserve only praise and my unreserved gratitude for their quality work, dedication and commitment.
As always, I would like to thank: Patrick McCartan, Publishing Director; Brian Stone, Editor for Social Science and Humanities Journals at Cambridge University Press; and Thomas Wilkes, Production Editor, for her being so helpful, efficient and supportive.
I would like to dedicate this editorial note to John Tait who, as aforementioned, is stepping down as one of the editors and will continue as “Founding Editor”. No one has contributed to the journal more than John – he played a key role in its foundation and once he became Executive Editor, he built an effective administration system which ensured there was a managed submission and review pipeline. He attracted an excellent editorial board of experts in the field who were not only well known, but also available to review or secure reviews and representative of the community around the world. John’s idea to publish calls for proposals for special issues periodically is still operational and successful, evidenced by the quality special issues published this year. John outlines the historical development of the Journal in his editorial note in Issue 25.1.
John left a legacy for a quality journal which I have been dedicated to following.
Ruslan Mitkov, Executive Editor
