| Challenge: | a vast number of papers accepted at top NLP venues come from a handful of western countries and (lately) China. |
| Approach: | They ask researchers to examine the relationship between geographical location and publication success . they use a dataset of 70,000 papers from the ACL Anthology to examine their citation network . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset of 70,000 papers from the ACL Anthology shows that there are substantial geographical disparities in paper acceptance and citations . |
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Some Languages are More Equal than Others: Probing Deeper into the Linguistic Disparity in the NLP World (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Linguistic disparity in the NLP world is widely acknowledged, but the reasons behind it are rarely discussed within the field. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorise languages based on speaker population and vitality . they also analyse the distribution of language data resources and amount of NLP/CL research . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model identifies the reasons for the disparity and suggests ways to overcome it. |
Examining Citations of Natural Language Processing Literature (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | citations of NLP papers have decreased in recent years, but long papers get three times as many citation as short papers . citation data from the ACL Anthology and Google Scholar can be used to understand the field and quantify the impact of different types of papers. |
| Approach: | They extract data from the ACL Anthology and Google Scholar to examine trends in citations of NLP papers. |
| Outcome: | The results show that only about 56% of the papers in AA are cited ten or more times . CL Journal has the most cited papers, but its citation dominance has lessened . |
NLP Needs Diversity outside of ‘Diversity’ (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new position paper argues that diversity in NLP is concentrated on a small number of areas surrounding fairness . |
| Approach: | a new position paper argues that diversity in NLP is disproportionately concentrated on fairness areas. |
| Outcome: | a new position paper argues that diversity in NLP is disproportionately concentrated on fairness areas. |
Forgotten Knowledge: Examining the Citational Amnesia in NLP (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a recent study examines how far back in time we tend to cite papers . citation patterns are correlated with age, age, and other factors . |
| Approach: | They analyze citation patterns across time and examine temporal changes . they find that 62% of cited papers are from the immediate five years prior to publication . |
| Outcome: | The authors show that citing papers is the primary method of scientific writing . they show that the trend has reversed and current papers have low temporal diversity . |
Citation Amnesia: On The Recency Bias of NLP and Other Academic Fields (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | citation age is a key factor in determining whether older works are cited in scientific journals or not. |
| Approach: | They examine the tendency of NLP to cite older work across 20 fields of study over 43 years (1980–2023) . they put NLP’s propensity to citation older work in the context of these 20 other fields to see whether differences can be observed . |
| Outcome: | The trend is strongest in NLP and ML research (-12.8% and -5.5% in citation age from previous peaks) |
Shoulders of Giants: A Look at the Degree and Utility of Openness in NLP Research (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | We analysed a sample of NLP research papers published in ACL Anthology . we observe a wide language-wise disparity in publicly available NLP-related artefacts . |
| Approach: | They analysed NLP research papers archived in ACL Anthology to quantify degree of openness and benefit of such an open culture in the NLP community. |
| Outcome: | The results show that more than 30% of the papers published in ACL Anthology do not release their artefacts publicly. |
Dataset Geography: Mapping Language Data to Language Users (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | linguistic diversity and coverage of natural language processing systems is a key factor in determining quality of data available in the language field . lack of linguistic, typological, and geographical diversity is acknowledged and documented . but, the advent of massively multilingual models presents opportunity and hope for under-represented languages . |
| Approach: | They analyze the geographical representativeness of NLP datasets to determine their utility . they also explore economic and geographical factors that may explain the observed distributions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is representative of the language diversity and coverage of natural language processing systems. |
Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | African languages are often left behind in state-of-the-art natural language processing systems and large language models. |
| Approach: | They analyze 884 research papers on NLP for African languages published over past five years . they identify key trends shaping the field and outline promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The findings identify key trends shaping the field and outline promising directions . the authors analyze 884 research papers on NLP for African languages published over the past five years . |
NLP Scholar: A Dataset for Examining the State of NLP Research (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Google Scholar is the largest web search engine for academic literature and provides access to rich metadata associated with the papers. |
| Approach: | They extracted citation information from the ACL Anthology (AA) for about 44 thousand NLP papers and identified authors who published at least three papers there. |
| Outcome: | The ACL Anthology (AA) is the largest repository of articles on Natural Language Processing (NLP). |
We are Who We Cite: Bridges of Influence Between Natural Language Processing and Other Academic Fields (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we quantify the degree of influence between 23 fields of study and NLP (on each other) |
| Approach: | They quantify the degree of influence between 23 fields of study and NLP on each other . they find that cross-field engagement of NLP has declined from 0.58 in 1980 to 0.31 in 2022 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed Citation Field Diversity Index (CFDI) has declined from 0.58 in 1980 to 0.31 in 2022, the authors show . |