Manuscript Guide to Journal Publication

December. 2023

1. Eligibility for submission

At least one of the authors must be an ANLP member.

2 Aims and Scope

JNLP invites paper submission in all areas of natural language processing and/or related fields. JNLP has the goal of coverage of a broad range of types and contents listed in the following table.

Type of paper
TypeContent
Paper General Paper Papers are manuscripts that present research findings or development results in natural language processing or related fields that are highly unique, novel and useful from an academic, engineering or social point of view, or research findings and development results regarding methods of designing, creating and assessing language resources such as corpora and dictionaries that can contribute to the development of the field of natural language processing.
System Paper Papers reporting the results of system development. For example, systems developed and manufactured in a business, a pilot system before manufacturing, a system developed in universities or national / public research organizations, etc. System paper will be reviewed upon standards distinct from general paper.
Technical ReportReports that provide useful information to the readers, summarizing the content, structure, characteristics, method of use, experience, evaluation, location information, method of obtaining, etc., of existing software and tools, as well as language information resources such as corpora and dictionaries.
Survey paperA paper summarizing, from a unique perspective, various literature on fields related to the Association for Natural Language Processing. Or, a paper based on such research that provides future prospects.

   Until now, screening of submitted papers emphasized academic value above all else. However, if the research community is to fulfill its social responsibility, efforts and ingenuity in non-academic social practices is often necessary, and promotion of such activities is a must for academia development. Therefore, the definition of “paper” has been revised as above in order to clarify that social value and value of creating language resources, as well as academic value, will be considered in future evaluation of submitted papers. We eagerly await to see increased diversity in the papers submitted.


3 Manuscript format and style

3.1 Manuscript

As a general rule, a manuscript should be prepared on A4 size paper with a word processor in accordance with the agreed style of published papers. A page of text for a Japanese manuscript should contain about 1,500 characters, while a page of text for an English manuscript should contain about 600 words. To submit a manuscript in MS Word format, use the template available from the website address below. For English-language papers, the person submitting the paper is responsible for proofreading the English text.
If the paper is approved for publication, send the source file of the final draft to the Association. If the person submitting the paper is able to create the manuscript using LaTeX, they should use the LaTeX style file designated by the Association, and send the source file. The style file may be downloaded from the URL below. As for figures and tables, if they have been created using the non-default LaTeX environment (picture environment, tabular environment, etc.), send such files of figures and tables as well.

3.2 Title, abstract and keywords

On the first page of the manuscript, provide in Japanese and English the type of manuscript, title, author's name, abstract and keywords that will be helpful to readers when locating the manuscript. A Japanese abstract should be 600 characters or less, while an English abstract should be 200 words or less. If the main text is in English, it is acceptable to provide a title, author's name, an abstract and keywords only in English. See below for an example.
論文
インタラクティブ機械翻訳システム
著者名
概要(600字以内)
キーワード:機械翻訳,インタラクティブ・システム,インタフェース

Paper
An Interactive Machine Translation System
Authors
Abstract (in 200 words or less)
Key Words: machine translation, interactive system, human interface

3.3 Description of previously published literature

If your manuscript is based on previous work by the author(s) other than a journal article (e.g., a conference or workshop paper, an online preprint on arXiv, a doctoral dissertation, a master’s or graduation thesis, etc.), please indicate where it was published in a footnote on the first page.

3.4 Main text

The main text should begin on the page following the page where English keywords are listed and should be organized in the sequence: Introduction, Body and Conclusion.
Figures and tables should be numbered serially with descriptions, as shown below.
図 1 AAAAA   図 2 BBBBB   表 1 CCCCC

Figure 1 AAAAA   Figure 2 BBBBB    Table 1 CCCCC

You can use colors to prepare lucid figures and tables.
Therefore, adequate consideration is required for barrier-free design for diverse color visions; further, it has to be designed so that it can be understood without color, and then secondary colors can be added for emphasis.

3.5 References

Citations should be indicated by inserting in the main text the author's name (lead author) and the year in parentheses wherever necessary. If there is more than one citation with the same author and the same year, insert Roman letters behind the year to differentiate them.
In the “References” page at the end of the manuscript, citations should be indicated in alphabetical order of the authors' surnames. Before each reference, provide the “Main text indication.” In general, provide the author, publication year (western calendar), title, magazine name, volume, number and pages for magazine articles, and author, publication year (western calendar), title, and publisher for books, in that order. (Any non-Roman original references should be alongside the Roman references transliterated into Roman script or translated into English.) See below for examples.
  • Main text indication: (Aho and Ullman 1972a; Shannon 1951)
  • References
    References
    Aho, Alfred V. and Ullman, Jeffrey D.(1972a). “Optimization of straight line code.” SIAM J. Computing, 1(1), pp. 1-19.
    Aho, Alfred V. and Ullman, Jeffrey D.(1972b). The Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling, Vol.I:Parsing. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
    大川太郎 (1995). 超高速構文解析法. 言語処理, 1(3), pp. 10-17. [Taro Okawa (1995). Cho-kosoku Kobun Kaiseki-ho. Gengo Shori, 1(3), pp.10-17.]
    Shannon, Claude (1951). “Prediction and entropy of printed English.” Bell Systems Technical Journal, 30, pp. 50-64.
    遠山金太郎(1989). 数学の基礎. 銀座書店.[Kintaro Toyama (1989). Fundamentals of Mathematics. Ginza Shoten.]

3.6 Appendix

When there is a need to present long mathematical formulae, detailed information about devices and systems, and other matters, they should be presented in Appendices so as to ensure the readability of the main text. Appendices should follow References and be followed by Authors' profiles.

3.7 Authors' profiles

All authors' profiles should be submitted if the manuscript is accepted for publication. Each profile in Japanese should be 200 characters or less and should include the author's name, date of birth, most recent academic institution (including department, course, etc) attended, year of completion of study at the institution, current job title and description, as well as awards and degrees conferred. See the example below. If the main text is in English, each author's profile should be also provided in English (100 words or less).
Goro O'oka (Regular member)
Graduated from Electronic Engineering Course, Faculty of Engineering, Kyoutou University in 1970. Completed a doctoral program of the above university in 1975. Doctor of Engineering. In the same year, joined Heisei Electric Co., Inc., and currently the Chief of the Multimedia Section, Technology Department. Involved with R&D of spoken language system. Member of Information Processing Society of Japan and ACL.

4. View on and approach to duplicate or secondary submissions

The Journal of Natural Language Processing's view on the duplicate/secondary submission of a paper is shown below.

Duplicate submission means the concurrent submissions of a paper that has been submitted to or being under peer review by one academic society to a different academic society whose review/reception period overlaps with that of the former academic society. Secondary submission means the submission of a paper that has been made public at one academic society, either in the form of presentation or as published work, to a different academic society whose review/reception period does not overlap with that of the former academic society.

The Journal of Natural Language Processing does not approve duplicate submission as stipulated in submission/double submission policies made by many academic societies. Exceptions to this are annual conference papers of ANLP, preprints and academic dissertations including doctoral dissertations, master’s or graduation theses. They are not considered either duplicate or secondary submissions.

The Journal of Natural Language Processing approves secondary submissions of limited types of papers. To put it specifically, secondary submissions of peer-reviewed journal articles are not approved, but previously published papers other than journal articles (e.g., conference or workshop papers, online preprints on arXiv, doctoral dissertations, master’s or graduation theses, etc.) are not considered secondary submissions. If you wish to submit one of them to the Journal of Natural Language Processing, please specify information about that previously published literature in the manuscript according to “3.3 Description of previously published literature.”

When more than half of the contents (research findings) of a peer-reviewed journal article are different from the contents of any of your published or contributed journal papers, that peer-reviewed article is considered a new different one, meaning its submission is not considered secondary.

Note, however, that to be given approval for secondary submission, the authors must own either of:
  1. the copyright of the original paper their manuscript is based on or
  2. the right to submit extended or translated versions to other journals
The first condition requires you to inform the Editorial Office at the time of submission that the authors have the copyright of the original paper, preferably along with supporting information (if any), such as a URL of a document discussing the copyright of the original paper. Providing supporting information is not mandatory, though.

The second condition requires you to provide the Editorial Office at the time of submission with specific information indicating that no trouble or conflict should arise from submitting extended or translated versions of the original paper to the Association for Natural Language Processing. This can be done by, for example, providing the URL of a document discussing the transfer of copyright ownership of the original paper, or proving that the original paper states that its content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In the case of an extended version, the difference between the original and the submitted papers must be at least 25% and this must also be shown to the Office at the time of submission. For a translated version, no such difference is required. In addition, you may have to check with the related academic societies or groups where you have published your paper because some academic societies require you to get permission for secondary submission or reuse of diagrams.

Please read and check the details in Ref. [1] before submission.

[1] Masayuki Asahara, Mitsuo Yoshida, Yusuke Miyao, and Masao Utiyama. (2022) Acceptable Secondary Publication. The Journal of Natural Language Processing. 29:3, 1037 --1042. https://doi.org/10.5715/jnlp.29.1037

5. Policy regarding citations of relevant previous studies

Regardless of whether a cited study is made public in the form of a journal article, an oral presentation, or a preprint, if it becomes available three or more months earlier than the submission of a paper, it is in principle regarded as a previous study. However, referees adopt the following policies flexibly regarding previously published relevant papers not written by the author(s) of the submitted paper:
  1. It is desirable for authors to cite relevant studies that become available less than three months prior to the submission of their respective papers.
  2. If a relevant preprint becomes available more than three months prior to submission but is not widely cited, authors may be excused for not being aware of it.
As for previously published papers written by the author(s) of the submitted paper, see the chapter "4. View on and approach to duplicate or secondary submissions".

6 Sending the manuscript

(1) Paper Submission
Submit a manuscript to the Editorial Office (nlp-submit [at] anlp.jp) as an attachment to an e-mail message containing information about the manuscript being submitted, by the paper submission deadline of each issue. Please use the cover letter template for sending manuscripts. If the manuscript is in English, inform the Editorial Office at the time of submission whether Japanese can be used for future inquiries. A receipt will be e-mailed after a manuscript is received by the Editorial Office.
  1. Information about the manuscript being submitted
    • Manuscript information: type of manuscript, names of all the co-authors, title, summary
    • Contact information of the lead author: name, postal code, address, affiliated organization and department/section, phone number, e-mail address
    • Name and (all) affiliations of each author. (Affiliation is important for determining the COI at the time of peer review. Therefore, kindly enter the unit or department to which you belong.)
    • Membership numbers of authors with an ANLP membership (at least one)
  2. Matters to be confirmed
    • Please affirm that your paper does not constitute a duplicate submission.
    • If any part of the content of your paper has already been published in another journal, please indicate the difference(s) between the published paper and your submitted paper. If it has already been presented in an authoritative international or other conference, please show the reference information of the presented paper, such as the name of the conference.
  3. PDF file of the manuscript to be refereed
    • Name the file as “yyyymmdd_author's name.pdf.” (e.g. 20150101_sato.pdf)
    • If you are unable to create PDF files, contact the Editorial Office by e-mail for assistance.
(2) Review
Manuscripts are reviewed by editorial and review committee members. Please see the editing schedule for details regarding when authors are notified about their result. Authors will be notified of their result via e-mail. The details of the review process are shown in 7: Reviews.

(3) Revised article submission
In case of an inquiry, please submit the revised article along with an author response to the review comments (in any format) by the designated deadline. Please indicate the revisions and additions clearly by using underlines, highlights, or other marks in the revised article.

(4) Final manuscript submission
When approved for publication, please send the final version of the manuscript by e-mail by the designated date in the editing schedule. We will send a proof sheet to the author, so please proofread it within one week. As a general rule, in the case of proofreading, the correction of the original manuscript, original drawings, etc. will not be accepted.

(5) Paper re-submission
When resubmitting a rejected manuscript, please send a summary of revision (in any format) explaining how it was revised from the previous manuscript.
If the editorial board decides that the contents of the resubmission explanation do not clarify the reason behind the manuscript’s rejection, the manuscript may be returned without going through the normal review process.

Send to: Editorial Office

7 Handling of manuscript by the Association

(1) Review
A member of the Editorial Committee takes charge of the reviewing process. The manuscript will be returned without a review if the Editorial Committee determines that it falls short of qualifying for a review.

(2) Reviewing criteria
Referees use the following criteria to review the manuscript (Usefulness and Novelty depend on the type of papers):
Members' interests
Whether the manuscript addresses a topic that interests members of the Association for Natural Language Processing

Credibility
Whether methods, experiments and arguments presented in the manuscript are logical and credible

Organization and Readability
Whether the manuscript is properly organized and coherent without ambiguous expressions

Usefulness and Novelty
  1. General Paper
    Usefulness
    Whether the manuscript is useful from academic, engineering or social perspectives.
    Novelty
    Whether the manuscript clearly shows research contributions in the subject area in relation to other published research work and presents new findings. The new findings here refer not only to new technologies and methods. As an example, if the author discusses standards and design policies for creating language resources, presenting findings beneficial to readers, etc., the manuscript is deemed to be novel. As another example, if the author applies existing methods to a new area or data and thus presents new findings based on examination of the research results, the manuscript is deemed to be novel.
  2. System Paper
    Usefulness
    It is desirable to show as objectively as possible that a constructed system can deal with realistic problems. If it includes objective evaluation, a manuscript is positively evaluated. Even if its performance is difficult to quantitatively evaluate, a proposed system may still be quantitatively evaluated in terms of, for example, how much it is used in the real world. If the quantitative evaluation cannot be indicated due to certain circumstances, the usefulness of a system is still demonstrable through clearly authorized qualitative evaluation (questionnaire results from the users, etc.) after specifying the reason for the decision.
    Novelty
    Even with a combination or integration of existing technologies, novelty of combination, novelty of the whole system, novelty of the design concept, novelty of the insights obtained by the designed /developed system are subjects for novelty. It is not necessarily required for a manuscript to include completely new research and development technology.
    Other
    Although they might not be concerned in theory, problems that must be solved when developing a practical system, as well as their solution method and evaluation (or observation) are very useful knowledge and should be positively evaluated.
  3. Technical Report
    Regardless of “novelty”, “usefulness” will be the main point for evaluation.
    Usefulness
    Is it useful for academic, engineering or social purposes?
  4. Survey Paper
    Usefulness
    Has prior research been thoroughly investigated?
    Are the essential citations provided?
    Is the overall view of the techniques concerned understood?
    Is the described content considered concrete and reliable?
    Novelty
    Is it summarized from a new viewpoint / perspective?
(3) Referee results
Submitted manuscripts will be rated as follows by the Editorial Committee based on the evaluation of the referee.
A Approved for publication
B Inquiry to author
The author will be contacted for some answers or revisions, after which the paper will be refereed once more. The focus of the inquiries is to clarify partially unexplained points or possible errors. Reply in writing. When making changes to the manuscript in relation to the inquiries, clearly indicate where the changes were made and why. As a general rule, the response deadline is within one month; if the deadline has passed, the schedule or issue number is adjusted without changing the review period, and if three months pass without a response, the manuscript will be considered as withdrawn.
C Denied publication
In the cases listed in (4), the manuscript will be denied publication, and returned to the author with the reasons for the denial.
(4) Manuscripts are denied publication when:
  1. the field of the manuscript is deemed unrelated to the Association.
  2. the manuscript contains one or more essential errors, or the content is not objectively discernable.
  3. the level of the content is low and it lacks novelty and importance.
  4. the manuscript has already been published in another journal or magazine, or its content has already been publicly known. (A manuscript that has already been published in periodical publications, such as other academic journals, corporate magazines and general magazines, will not be accepted for publication. However, the material used in an oral presentation at an academic society's meeting, workshop, symposium or international conference may be accepted for publication only when permission is given by the copyright owner.)
  5. the content is excessively difficult or incomplete, with no prospect of improvement.
  6. When the Association for Natural Language Processing determines that it does not sufficiently emphasize “Precautions when writing” in the following chapter.

8 Precautions when writing

When writing, pay due care to the following points so as to avoid copyright infringement.
  • Pay attention so as not to infringe the copyrights, image rights, honor, privacy or other rights of other persons.
  • When you cite the work of another person, please be sure to explicitly cite the source, etc. Please follow be sure to stay within the upper limit of the legitimate scope of quotation under the Copyright Act for citation for purposes such as commentary or research.
  • The above still holds even if the information is obtained from the internet, with the exception of information whose use can be confirmed as clearly and uniformly permitted by the right holder for purposes such as open science.
  • The relevant portion of information such as the address of a living individual, whose publication contravenes the Personal Information Protection Law, shall be redacted. Information that does not contravene the Personal Information Protection Law shall also be partially redacted if necessary.
  • Take care that any information obtained by consenting to specific terms of use is used within the framework of such terms of use.
  • In addition to the above, take care that the content does not promote or encourage criminal or other illegal acts.
If the manuscript content infringes a third party’s copyright or other rights, etc., or if the content is identified as illegal, the author will be held liable, and is asked to resolve the matter without incurring damage to any other party.

9 Copyright and digital releasing of paper

As a general rule, the copyright of a paper approved for publication belongs to the Association. (The copyright including rights under Copyright Act Article 27 and Article 28 must be transferred to the Association at the time of the submission of the final manuscript for printing.) The copyright of a paper approved for publication follows the “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC BY 4.0)” (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).  If the copyright belongs to an affiliated organization or other party, making it difficult for the Association to own the copyright, the matter will be discussed upon request. Please note that the Association may make published papers electronically accessible through J-STAGE, an online article database service, and other services, so that the findings presented in the papers may be widely shared and may contribute to future academic research.
Anyone other than the Association can digitize such paper and release it to third parties using digital media such as computer networks or CD-ROMs. However, the volume, number, and pages of the Journal of Natural Language Processing of the publication and the standard of CC BY 4.0 must be clearly indicated for all viewers. NOTE: This includes the author of the published paper, repositories, etc. as below.
Sadao Kurohashi and Makoto Nagao. (1994) A Syntactic Analysis Method of Long Japanese Sentences based on Coordinate Structures’ Detection. 1:1, 35--57. (C) The Association for Natural Language Processing, (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
If the author reproduces a part of the published paper (chart, etc.), please write as below including the author of the paper.
Figure 1 of Sadao Kurohashi and Makoto Nagao. (1994) A Syntactic Analysis Method of Long Japanese Sentences based on Coordinate Structures’ Detection. 1:1, 35--57. (C) The Association for Natural Language Processing, (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Since the copyright of a paper approved for publication follows CC BY 4.0, the Association for Natural Language Processing will not file an opposition based on its holding of the copyright to the republication of the research findings claimed in the approved paper in doctoral dissertations, master’s or graduation theses.

10 Article Processing Charge

If a submitted paper is approved for publication, the author is obligated to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). The APC is 30,000 yen for up to 15 printed pages (around 22,500 characters for a Japanese paper), plus 5,000 yen for each additional page. However, an additional fee may be charged for manuscripts created with MS Word, or those created with LaTeX but requiring much typesetting work.Please assist us by using the designated file type for easy typesetting.
Also, keep in mind the APC waiver system explained below.
There is a system to support those submitting papers who must privately pay for the APC, in order to promote the submission of outstanding papers from various fields related to natural language processing. This system waives the payment of an APC for those who find it difficult to obtain funding from affiliated organizations, such as researchers who belong to research organizations that do not provide financial aid for paper submission costs, or those transferred to another organization after the paper submission but before its publication. If you wish to apply for this waiver, attach a brief statement as to why you need a waiver to your paper submission. If the Editorial Committee approves of the waiver after screening, up to 50,000 yen of the APC for published papers will be waived.

11 Plagiarism detection tool

Papers submitted after 1 January 2023 will be checked for similarity to other papers with a plagiarism detection tool, "Similarity Check". The results of the plagiarism detection tool will be checked by the editorial board and reviewers to identify references that should be cited.
Crossref Similarity Check logo
In conjunction with the introduction of the plagiarism detection tool, the full text of all articles in all issues of the journal "Natural Language Processing" published on J-STAGE have been registered in the Similarity Check Database. When Similarity Check is used by individual institutions, the number of registered papers in the field of language processing will also be expanded. Please use the service to identify similarities with existing studies and references that should be cited.