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).
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 here.
To be eligible for presentation (oral or poster, etc.) at ACL 2026, CL papers must satisfy both of the following conditions:
1. receive and accepted decision by March 6th and;
2. have the final version submitted (and approved to be sent to MIT Press) by March 14th.
To be eligible for presentation (oral or poster, etc.) at EACL 2026, CL papers must satisfy both of the following conditions:
1. receive and accepted decision by November 27th and;
2. have the final version submitted (and approved to be sent to MIT Press) by December 12th.
