The Elephant in the Room: Analyzing the Presence of Big Tech in Natural Language Processing Research

Mohamed Abdalla, Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Aurélie Névéol, Fanny Ducel, Saif Mohammad, Karen Fort


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.734
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13141–13160
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.734
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.734
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohamed Abdalla, Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Aurélie Névéol, Fanny Ducel, Saif Mohammad, and Karen Fort. 2023. The Elephant in the Room: Analyzing the Presence of Big Tech in Natural Language Processing Research. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13141–13160, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Elephant in the Room: Analyzing the Presence of Big Tech in Natural Language Processing Research (Abdalla et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.734.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.734.mp4