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

Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Volume 1: Long Papers, pages 13141–13160 July 9-14, 2023 ©2023 Association for Computational Linguistics 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 M. MohammadΦ, Karën Fort♢ ♠Institute for Better Health, Canada, ♣University of Göttingen, Germany ♦Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN, France, ♢Sorbonne Université / LORIA, France ΦNational Research Council, Canada msa@cs.toronto.edu wahle@uni-goettingen.de Abstract Recent advances in deep learning methods for natural language processing (NLP) have cre- ated new business opportunities and made NLP research critical for industry development. As one of the big players in the field of NLP, to- gether 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 pub- lications and 701 resumes of NLP publication authors, we explore the industry presence in the field since the early 90s. We find that in- dustry 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 pub- lications and provide funding to academic re- searchers through grants and internships. Our study shows that the presence and impact of the industry on natural language processing re- search are significant and fast-growing. This work calls for increased transparency of indus- try influence in the field. 1 Introduction Research is influenced by several entities such as academia, government, and industry. Their roles and degrees of influence change over time. Re- cent deep learning advances in natural language processing (NLP) have created a spurt of new busi- ness opportunities, making NLP research critical for industry development. In turn, we are observing a greater presence of large technology companies (Big Tech) on NLP research than ever before. This influence on research can be beneficial. Companies provide funding, and participate in open science initiatives (Gulbrandsen and Smeby, 2005; Hot- tenrott and Thorwarth, 2011). However, there are ∗Equal contribution. 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 0% 2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12% 14% % of papers with industry affiliation Figure 1: Proportion of papers in the ACL anthology with at least one industry affiliation (1995 - 2022). growing voices of concern about scientific inde- pendence and power (Abdalla and Abdalla, 2021; Whittaker, 2021) — from controlling the acces- sibility of massive amounts of computing power to powerful language models (Devlin et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020). It is in the interest of any community to pause and reflect on who has the power, what their inter- ests and values might be, and how they are influ- encing research. Thus, this recent period of great change in NLP research merits a reflection on the changing role of industry in research, as well as their …

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