Collaboration or Corporate Capture? Quantifying NLP's Reliance on Industry Artifacts and Contributions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Aitken, Will, Abdalla, Mohamed, Rudie, Karen, Stinson, Catherine
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Aitken, Will
Abdalla, Mohamed
Rudie, Karen
Stinson, Catherine
author_facet Aitken, Will
Abdalla, Mohamed
Rudie, Karen
Stinson, Catherine
contents Impressive performance of pre-trained models has garnered public attention and made news headlines in recent years. Almost always, these models are produced by or in collaboration with industry. Using them is critical for competing on natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks and correspondingly to stay relevant in NLP research. We surveyed 100 papers published at EMNLP 2022 to determine the degree to which researchers rely on industry models, other artifacts, and contributions to publish in prestigious NLP venues and found that the ratio of their citation is at least three times greater than what would be expected. Our work serves as a scaffold to enable future researchers to more accurately address whether: 1) Collaboration with industry is still collaboration in the absence of an alternative or 2) if NLP inquiry has been captured by the motivations and research direction of private corporations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_03912
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Collaboration or Corporate Capture? Quantifying NLP's Reliance on Industry Artifacts and Contributions
Aitken, Will
Abdalla, Mohamed
Rudie, Karen
Stinson, Catherine
Computation and Language
Impressive performance of pre-trained models has garnered public attention and made news headlines in recent years. Almost always, these models are produced by or in collaboration with industry. Using them is critical for competing on natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks and correspondingly to stay relevant in NLP research. We surveyed 100 papers published at EMNLP 2022 to determine the degree to which researchers rely on industry models, other artifacts, and contributions to publish in prestigious NLP venues and found that the ratio of their citation is at least three times greater than what would be expected. Our work serves as a scaffold to enable future researchers to more accurately address whether: 1) Collaboration with industry is still collaboration in the absence of an alternative or 2) if NLP inquiry has been captured by the motivations and research direction of private corporations.
title Collaboration or Corporate Capture? Quantifying NLP's Reliance on Industry Artifacts and Contributions
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03912