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.

翻译：摘要：近年来，深度学习方法在自然语言处理（NLP）领域的进展创造了新的商业机会，并使NLP研究对产业发展至关重要。作为NLP领域的重要参与者之一，与政府和大学一样，追踪工业界对研究的影响十分重要。在本研究中，我们试图量化和描述工业界在NLP社区中随时间变化的存在。利用包含78,187篇NLP出版物全面元数据的语料库和701份NLP出版物作者的简历，我们探索了自90年代初以来该领域的工业界存在。我们发现，在过去的五年中（从2017年到2022年增长了180%），NLP作者中的工业界存在经历了一段稳定期后急剧增加。少数公司贡献了大部分出版物，并通过资助和实习向学术研究人员提供资金。我们的研究表明，工业界对自然语言处理研究的存在和影响是显著且快速增长的。这项工作呼吁提高该领域工业界影响的透明度。