The Influence Between NLP and Other Fields
Free while signed in. Answers cite the passages they came from.
This EMNLP 2023 analysis quantifies NLP's cross-disciplinary engagement using a Citation Field Diversity Index across 23 academic fields. The headline: NLP has become dramatically more insular over four decades.
CFDI drop: The Citation Field Diversity Index fell from 0.58 in 1980 to 0.31 in 2022 - an all-time low, indicating NLP increasingly cites itself rather than drawing from neighboring fields.
CS dominance: Over 80% of NLP citations now go to computer science, with less than 8% to linguistics and less than 3% each to mathematics and psychology.
Growing echo chamber: The paper quantifies an explicit rise in intra-field citation alongside a decline in multidisciplinary works, painting NLP as a community that has closed off from cognate disciplines.
Call to action: The authors argue the field needs to actively rebuild engagement with linguistics, psychology, and the social sciences if it wants research foundations broader than "scale and transformers."
Get next week’s papers.
The same picks and the same summaries, in your inbox. Free, and 176 issues deep.
Subscribe on Substack