Joint IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing

      Mari Ostendorf
      Li Deng
      Marcello Federico
      Steve Renals

On August 2nd 2013, IEEE and ACM announced that the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP) and the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing (TSLP) will be published jointly as the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, starting January 2014.  As the Vice President-Publications of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and as the Editors-in-Chief of the two merging transactions, we are all delighted with the agreement that has led to these new, merged transactions.

IEEE's TASLP is a very well-established publication, strong in both quality and quantity.  It is closely linked to ICASSP and to a number of workshops, such as ASRU and SLT.  The language area is a more recent addition to TASLP, incorporated in 2006.  ACM's TSLP is a more recent publication.  The quality has been very high, but the quantity only sustains a quarterly publication. There is no ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) or conference connection in this area, so a sustained direct link to the research community has been more difficult.

A key motivation for the merger is that IEEE's TASLP does not yet have a strong profile in the language processing community, and this is reflected in the submissions received and the composition of the Editorial Board.  ACM's TSLP has a stronger profile and Editorial Board membership in this area.  Thus we believe that a joint transactions will be stronger than either publication on its own.

As part of the merger, we have taken the opportunity to restructure the editorial board.  In addition to the role of Editor-in-Chief, there will be six Senior Area Editors to advise the Editor on the full range of topics covered by the journal.  Li Deng will continue as Editor-in-Chief of the merged Transactions, and ACM TSLP editors Steve Renals and Marcello Federico will serve as Senior Area Editors, along with Hermann Ney, Haizhou Li, Sharon Gannot and George Tzanetakis.

Papers from the new Transactions will appear in both IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library.  Publication will be managed by IEEE as a hybrid journal, allowing either traditional or open access manuscript submission.  The new journal welcomes novel contributions in all areas covered by the two journals, which includes audio, speech, and language processing and the sciences that support them.  Later this month we shall announce an expanded editorial board  to include representations from the ACM community, particularly in the area of language processing. We shall also revise the EDICS of the joint transactions, notably with the expansion of the previous Spoken Language Processing category in the IEEE TASLP to the new category of Human Language Technology in the joint IEEE/ACM TASLP, which covers both spoken and written language processing.

For more information on paper submission, see http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications/periodicals/taslp/.