Letter from the chair

The current slate of ACM journals does not provide much outlet for AI research. So any proposal to start an ACM journal in an area of AI merits serious consideration. Just such a proposal is about to be made to the ACM Publications Board by Dr. Kishore Papineni of IBM' s T.J. Watson Research Center. Dr. Papineni is proposing a new journal, tentatively titled " Transactions on Speech and Language Processing. " I think that SIGART should give strong support to his proposal. The proposed journal will focus on the theory, design, development, and evaluation of practical systems that process human language in text or spoken form. The scope is intentionally broad: A subset of possible topics for papers includes natural language understanding, natural language generation, machine translation, document summarization, question-answer systems , speech recognition, speech generation, and audio indexing. Submitted papers will be subjected to reviewing standards typical for ACM journals. About 20 high-quality papers will be published per year, starting in 2003. Because of its broad coverage and its emphasis on practical methods and systems, the proposed journal differs significantly from existing journals such as " Computational Linguistics, " " Natural Language Engineering, " " Machine Translation, " " Computer Speech and Language, " IEEE' s " Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing. " And of course the new journal would carry the ACM imprimatur, which is useful to authors and readers alike as an implicit indicator of quality. If you have any thoughts on Dr. Papineni's proposal, I encourage you to share them with him (papineni@us.ibm.com) and with me (marks@merl.com). In future letters I will summarize any comments received and keep you apprised of future developments regarding the proposed journal. P.S. Chris Welty, the Editor-in-Chief of our magazine, lost a brother in the September 11th attack. Timothy Welty was a member of the New York City Fire Department and was in the World Trade Center when it collapsed. We offer our support and sympathy to Chris in these difficult days.