Exploring the Landscape of Natural Language Processing Research
This provides a systematic classification for NLP researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing surveys.
The authors tackled the lack of a comprehensive study categorizing NLP research topics and trends by systematically analyzing papers in the ACL Anthology, resulting in a structured overview and taxonomy of the field.
As an efficient approach to understand, generate, and process natural language texts, research in natural language processing (NLP) has exhibited a rapid spread and wide adoption in recent years. Given the increasing research work in this area, several NLP-related approaches have been surveyed in the research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics, identifies trends, and outlines areas for future research remains absent. Contributing to closing this gap, we have systematically classified and analyzed research papers in the ACL Anthology. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of fields of study in NLP, analyze recent developments in NLP, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.