Natural language processing – ETO Research Almanac

ETO Research Almanac

Between 2017 and 2022, researchers published roughly

135,000

English-language articles on natural language processing

The global natural language processing literature grew

104%

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 March 14, 2024

Vital signs

135,433
natural language processing articles were released between 2017 and 2022 (estd.)
104%
growth in research between 2017 and 2022
11%
of all artificial intelligence articles focused on natural language processing

Citation impact

18
citations for the average natural language processing article
16
citations for the average artificial intelligence article

Countries

21%
of natural language processing articles have American authors
18%
have Chinese authors
17%
have European authors

Country	Articles (2017-2021)	Growth (2017-2021)	Global share	Citations per article
United States	21,989	101%	21%	53.8
China	19,486	152%	18%	21.5
India	5,821	96%	5%	13.3

Top-cited articles

Attention Is All You Need
2017: arXiv. 83,896 citations
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
2018: arXiv. 69,267 citations
RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach
2019: arXiv. 16,492 citations
Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
2019. 13,403 citations
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
2019: arXiv. 11,486 citations
Deep contextualized word representations
2018: arXiv. 11,126 citations
Transformers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing
2019: arXiv. 11,032 citations
Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training
2018. 7,185 citations
BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension
2019: arXiv. 7,159 citations
Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks
2019: arXiv. 6,955 citations

Research organizations

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

#1 Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
#2 Microsoft (United States)
#3 Carnegie Mellon University (United States)

Organization	Articles (2017-2022)	Citations per article	Country
Chinese Academy of Sciences	1,649	28.7	China
Microsoft	1,622	72.9	United States
Carnegie Mellon University	1,396	72.8	United States

Patents and industry

4%
of natural language processing articles are cited in patents
5%
of artificial intelligence articles are cited in patents
6%
of natural language processing articles had authors from private companies (vs 4% of artificial intelligence articles in general)

Top industry organizations by publication count

Company	Articles (2017-2022)	Citations per article	Country
Microsoft	1,617	73.1	United States
Google	1,341	257.1	United States
Amazon	704	35.6	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.