This year the journal is celebrating its 25th anniversary. For a journal that has been steadily growing and increasing in popularity and strength for more than 25 years now, this anniversary is indeed a special achievement.
Last year, during one of my regular meetings with Brian Stone, Commissioning Editor of Humanities and Social Science Journals (also my main contact at Cambridge University Press), Brian proposed the brilliant idea of inviting influential scholars to write anniversary papers reflecting on the development of a specific field over the last 25 years. After the articles published in Issue 25.3, ‘Then and now – 25 years of Natural Language Engineering’ authored by John Tait and Yorick Wilks, and Robert Dale’s ‘NLP commercialisation in the last 25 years’, I now present to you Issue 25.6, which exclusively features anniversary papers. Ralph Grishman surveys the developments in Information Extraction; Roberto Navigli and Federico Martelli offer an overview of Word and Sense Similarity; and Aline Villavicencio and Marco Idiart provide on overview on the work on Multiword Expressions. Also in this issue, Constantin Orasan sums up the development of Text Summarisation over the last 25 years, and as part of his column ‘Emerging Trends’, Ken Church – in co-authorship with Joel Hestness – surveys 25 years of Evaluation. Finally, in his column ‘Industry Watch’, Robert Dale proposes five tips for a successful API.
An ‘anniversary special’ virtual issue, featuring all anniversary papers including the two anniversary contributions in 25.3, will be published soon.
At the end of this anniversary year, I would like to thank all who have made the journal a success story over the last 25 years: all authors, reviewers, members of the editorial board, editors, editorial assistants, and all Cambridge University Press staff. We have an excellent basis on which to continue going from strength to strength and to offer even more high-quality, interesting and diverse content to the research community for many years to come!
