Reconstructing the Semantic Landscape of Natural Language Processing

Elisa Omodei, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Thierry Poibeau


Abstract
This paper investigates the evolution of the computational linguistics domain through a quantitative analysis of the ACL Anthology (containing around 12,000 papers published between 1985 and 2008). Our approach combines complex system methods with natural language processing techniques. We reconstruct the socio-semantic landscape of the domain by inferring a co-authorship and a semantic network from the analysis of the corpus. First, keywords are extracted using a hybrid approach mixing linguistic patterns with statistical information. Then, the semantic network is built using a co-occurrence analysis of these keywords within the corpus. Combining temporal and network analysis techniques, we are able to examine the main evolutions of the field and the more active subfields over time. Lastly we propose a model to explore the mutual influence of the social and the semantic network over time, leading to a socio-semantic co-evolutionary system.
Anthology ID:
L14-1511
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2972–2978
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/643_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elisa Omodei, Jean-Philippe Cointet, and Thierry Poibeau. 2014. Reconstructing the Semantic Landscape of Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 2972–2978, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Reconstructing the Semantic Landscape of Natural Language Processing (Omodei et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/643_Paper.pdf