Rediscovering 50 years of discoveries in speech and language processing: A survey

Abstract

We have created the NLP4NLP corpus to study the content of scientific publications in the field of speech and natural language processing. It contains articles published in 34 major conferences and journals in that field over a period of 50 years (1965-2015), comprising 65,000 documents, gathering 50,000 authors, including 325,000 references and representing approximately 270 million words. Most of these publications are in English, some are in French, German or Russian. Some are open access, others have been provided by the publishers. In order to constitute and analyze this corpus several tools have been used or developed. Some of them use Natural Language Processing methods that have been published in the corpus, hence its name. Numerous manual corrections were necessary, which demonstrated the importance of establishing standards for uniquely identifying authors, publications or resources. We have conducted various studies: evolution over time of the number of articles and authors, collaborations between authors, citations between papers and authors, evolution of research themes and identification of the authors who introduced them, measure of innovation and detection of epistemological ruptures, use of language resources, reuse of articles and plagiarism in the context of a global or comparative analysis between sources.