Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Abdalla, Mohamed, Wahle, Jan Philip, Ruas, Terry, Névéol, Aurélie, Ducel, Fanny, Mohammad, Saif M., Fort, Karën
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02797
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914871640064000
author Abdalla, Mohamed
Wahle, Jan Philip
Ruas, Terry
Névéol, Aurélie
Ducel, Fanny
Mohammad, Saif M.
Fort, Karën
author_facet Abdalla, Mohamed
Wahle, Jan Philip
Ruas, Terry
Névéol, Aurélie
Ducel, Fanny
Mohammad, Saif M.
Fort, Karën
contents Recent advances in deep learning methods for natural language processing (NLP) have created new business opportunities and made NLP research critical for industry development. As one of the big players in the field of NLP, together with governments and universities, it is important to track the influence of industry on research. In this study, we seek to quantify and characterize industry presence in the NLP community over time. Using a corpus with comprehensive metadata of 78,187 NLP publications and 701 resumes of NLP publication authors, we explore the industry presence in the field since the early 90s. We find that industry presence among NLP authors has been steady before a steep increase over the past five years (180% growth from 2017 to 2022). A few companies account for most of the publications and provide funding to academic researchers through grants and internships. Our study shows that the presence and impact of the industry on natural language processing research are significant and fast-growing. This work calls for increased transparency of industry influence in the field.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_02797
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Elephant in the Room: Analyzing the Presence of Big Tech in Natural Language Processing Research
Abdalla, Mohamed
Wahle, Jan Philip
Ruas, Terry
Névéol, Aurélie
Ducel, Fanny
Mohammad, Saif M.
Fort, Karën
Computation and Language
Recent advances in deep learning methods for natural language processing (NLP) have created new business opportunities and made NLP research critical for industry development. As one of the big players in the field of NLP, together with governments and universities, it is important to track the influence of industry on research. In this study, we seek to quantify and characterize industry presence in the NLP community over time. Using a corpus with comprehensive metadata of 78,187 NLP publications and 701 resumes of NLP publication authors, we explore the industry presence in the field since the early 90s. We find that industry presence among NLP authors has been steady before a steep increase over the past five years (180% growth from 2017 to 2022). A few companies account for most of the publications and provide funding to academic researchers through grants and internships. Our study shows that the presence and impact of the industry on natural language processing research are significant and fast-growing. This work calls for increased transparency of industry influence in the field.
title The Elephant in the Room: Analyzing the Presence of Big Tech in Natural Language Processing Research
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02797