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：深度学习在自然语言处理（NLP）领域的最新进展创造了新的商业机会，并使NLP研究成为产业发展的关键。作为NLP领域的重要参与者之一，与政府和高校并列，跟踪产业对研究的影响至关重要。本研究旨在量化并描述NLP领域中产业随时间推移的参与特征。我们利用包含78,187篇NLP出版物元数据的语料库及701份NLP论文作者简历，自20世纪90年代初起探索该领域的产业参与情况。研究发现，NLP作者的产业从业比例在近五年内呈急剧增长之前（2017年至2022年增长180%）一直保持稳定。少数公司贡献了大部分出版物，并通过资助和实习为学术研究者提供资金支持。研究显示，产业在自然语言处理研究中的存在感和影响力显著且快速增长。这项研究呼吁提高该领域产业影响的透明度。