Natural language processing – ETO Research Almanac

ETO Research Almanac

Between 2017 and 2022, researchers published roughly

145,000

English-language articles on natural language processing

The global natural language processing literature grew

114%

between 2017 and 2022

Articles on natural language processing made up

11%

of all articles on artificial intelligence

Authors from private companies contributed to

of natural language processing articles

What counts as "natural language processing" research?•How precise are these numbers?•What are the other caveats?

Explore relevant research in the Map of Science

Data last updated October 15, 2024

Vital signs

147,090
natural language processing articles were released between 2017 and 2022 (estd.)
114%
growth in research between 2017 and 2022
11%
of all artificial intelligence articles focused on natural language processing

Citation impact

23
citations for the average natural language processing article
20
citations for the average artificial intelligence article

Countries

20%
of natural language processing articles have American authors
19%
have Chinese authors
19%
have European authors

Country	Articles (2017-2022)	Growth (2017-2022)	Global share	Citations per article
United States	28,951	116%	20%	56.6
China	28,165	165%	19%	20
India	11,642	148%	8%	12.2

Top-cited articles

Attention Is All You Need
2017: arXiv. 115,917 citations
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
2018: arXiv. 89,330 citations
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
2020: arXiv. 30,392 citations
RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach
2019: arXiv. 21,997 citations
Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
2019. 17,485 citations
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
2019: arXiv. 16,204 citations
Deep contextualized word representations
2018: arXiv. 12,480 citations
HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing
2019: arXiv. 11,251 citations
Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks
2019: arXiv. 10,409 citations
BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension
2019: arXiv. 9,523 citations

Research organizations

Top producers of natural language processing research (by article count)

#1 Microsoft (United States)
#2 Carnegie Mellon University (United States)
#3 Google (United States)

Organization	Articles (2017-2022)	Citations per article	Country
Microsoft	1,913	80.3	United States
Carnegie Mellon University	1,554	84.9	United States
Google	1,546	321.6	United States

Patents and industry

5%
of natural language processing articles are cited in patents
6%
of artificial intelligence articles are cited in patents
9%
of natural language processing articles had authors from private companies (vs 6% of artificial intelligence articles in general)

Top industry organizations by publication count

Company	Articles (2017-2022)	Citations per article	Country
Microsoft	1,913	80.3	United States
Google	1,546	321.6	United States
Amazon	902	39.5	United States

The Research Almanac runs on bibliometric data from Clarivate Web of Science and other sources. For details on our sourcing, methodology, and limitations, see the tool documentation.