NLPExplorer: Exploring the Universe of NLP Papers
This tool addresses the bottleneck of understanding research trends for NLP researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing indexing and visualization methods.
The authors tackled the problem of navigating the growing volume of NLP research by developing NLPExplorer, an automatic portal for indexing, searching, and visualizing papers, which provides insights into trends, authors, and topics, with features like curated categories and temporal statistics.
Understanding the current research trends, problems, and their innovative solutions remains a bottleneck due to the ever-increasing volume of scientific articles. In this paper, we propose NLPExplorer, a completely automatic portal for indexing, searching, and visualizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) research volume. NLPExplorer presents interesting insights from papers, authors, venues, and topics. In contrast to previous topic modelling based approaches, we manually curate five course-grained non-exclusive topical categories namely Linguistic Target (Syntax, Discourse, etc.), Tasks (Tagging, Summarization, etc.), Approaches (unsupervised, supervised, etc.), Languages (English, Chinese,etc.) and Dataset types (news, clinical notes, etc.). Some of the novel features include a list of young popular authors, popular URLs, and datasets, a list of topically diverse papers and recent popular papers. Also, it provides temporal statistics such as yearwise popularity of topics, datasets, and seminal papers. To facilitate future research and system development, we make all the processed datasets accessible through API calls. The current system is available at http://lingo.iitgn.ac.in:5001/