Official flagship journal of the ACL · Since 1974
Advancing our understanding of language through computation
Peer-reviewed research in computational linguistics, natural language processing and the computational study of language. Fully open access, published by MIT Press.
Call for Papers · Special Issue
The Ethics of NLP and CL
We invite theoretical and technical contributions that reflect on the ethics of language technologies, including bias and fairness, algorithmically mediated harms, power relationships, multilingual and decolonial perspectives, environmental impacts and data labour. Inter-, cross- and transdisciplinary submissions are particularly encouraged.
Submission deadline: 27 November 2026 · Notification: February 2027 · Expected publication: October 2027
Guest editors: Karën Fort (Université de Lorraine / LORIA), Margot Mieskes (University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt), Zeerak Talat (University of Edinburgh)
Award · 2026
CL High Impact Paper Award
The 2026 award goes to Universal Dependencies by Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher D. Manning, Joakim Nivre and Daniel Zeman.
The award recognizes papers published in Computational Linguistics within the past 3–5 years that have already demonstrated exceptional scholarly impact. Universal Dependencies established a unified, cross-linguistically consistent framework for grammatical annotation that has fundamentally shaped multilingual NLP research.
Award · 2026
CL Distinguished Reviewer Award
Congratulations to the Class of 2026, recognized for reviews that have had a meaningful impact on the quality of the journal:
Nate ChambersJason EisnerFrancis FerraroIvan HabernalXianpei HanSophie HaoEduard HovyFintan MalloryYevgen MatusevychTristan MillerAgata SavaryDominik SchlechtwegEdward StablerZhongyu Wei
Thank you for upholding the high standards of peer review at Computational Linguistics.
Award · 2026
ACL Computational Linguistics Doctoral Dissertation Award
Winner: Verna Dankers, Memorisation Meets Compositionality in Natural Language Processing
Honorable mentions:
Selected from 34 nominated dissertations completed between 1 September 2024 and 31 August 2025. Award-winning dissertations will be published in Computational Linguistics.
Computational Linguistics, established in 1974, is the official flagship journal of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). It is a leading venue for scholarly work spanning computational linguistics, natural language processing, and related areas in the computational study of language.
The journal publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed research advancing our understanding of language through computation. It welcomes strong contributions in theoretical modeling, empirical investigation, system design, and scalable methods for language representation, generation, and understanding, with particular emphasis on challenging aspects of language modeling, emerging computational paradigms (including large-scale language models), and research bridging theoretical, empirical, linguistic, and interdisciplinary perspectives.
To ensure timely, high-quality dissemination, Computational Linguistics maintains a rigorous yet efficient editorial process. As of 2025, the average time to first decision is 16.5 days (including desk rejections) and 55.0 days (excluding desk rejections). The journal's 2025 impact factor is 13.4.
All articles are freely available online, published electronically by MIT Press (E-ISSN: 1530-9312) with immediate open access. Print issues (ISSN: 0891-2017) are released quarterly and distributed globally. Original papers may also be presented at ACL-sponsored conferences such as ACL and EMNLP, with select works highlighted during these events.
The current Editor-in-Chief is Wei Lu (since 2024). Meet the full editorial team.
To be eligible for presentation (oral or poster, etc.) at AAAI 2027, CL papers must satisfy both of the following conditions:
1. receive an accepted decision by October 26, 2026 and;
2. have the final version submitted (and approved to be sent to MIT Press) by November 9, 2026.
To be eligible for presentation (oral or poster, etc.) at EACL 2027
CL papers must satisfy both of the following conditions:
1. be accepted by October 8, 2026 and;
2. have final version submitted (and approved) to CL by October 22, 2026
