The Influence Between NLP and Other Fields
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.
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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."