Natural Language Engineering (NLE) has enjoyed another year promoting research of applied Natural Language Processing and serving the research community in the field. We were particularly pleased to register an increasing number of submissions on a wide range of topics reflecting the growing importance of the field. We were also delighted to receive a number of submissions representing the new article types announced in 2010, such as surveys and squibs.

A new online editorial system was introduced in 2011, which has facilitated the submission and processing of articles. This has enhanced the efficiency of the journal and the turnaround time has been very much improved.

As confirmed in a previous editorial, NLE was accepted into Thomson Reuters Citation Index and is now being indexed in many of their products, most importantly in both the Science and the Social Science editions of the Journals Citation Reports (JCR). The first Impact Factor is expected in June 2012, for the 2011 Impact Factor lists.

I would like to seize this opportunity to thank the outgoing members of the Editorial Board – Steven Bird, Bernardo Magnini, Dragomir Radev, Lucia Helena Machado Rino, Martin Russell, Hans Uszkoreit, Yorick Wilks and Dekai Wu for their input. At the same time, I would like to extend a warm welcome to the new members of the Editorial Board – Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, Lori Lamel, Inderjeet Mani, Yuji Matsumoto, Manuel Palomar, Khalil Sima'an, Rajeev Sangal and Bonnie Webber. I am confident that the input from the new members will contribute to further raising the standards and quality of the journal.

I cannot miss the opportunity to thank my Fellow Editors, the Book Review Editor, the rest of the Editorial Board and my Editorial Assistants.

Last but not the least, I would like to say a big ‘thank you’ to our outgoing Editorial Assistant Irina Temnikova for her hard work, commitment and efficiency in serving the journal for the last 5 years.