Towards a Computational History of the ACL: 1980-2008.

We develop a people-centered computational history of science that tracks authors over topics and apply it to the history of computational linguistics. We present four findings in this paper. First, we identify the topical subfields authors work on by assigning automatically generated topics to each paper in the ACL Anthology from 1980 to 2008. Next, we identify four distinct research epochs where the pattern of topical overlaps are stable and different from other eras: an early NLP period from 1980 to 1988, the period of US government-sponsored MUC and ATIS evaluations from 1989 to 1994, a transitory period until 2001, and a modern integration period from 2002 onwards. Third, we analyze the flow of authors across topics to discern how some subfields flow into the next, forming different stages of ACL research. We find that the government-sponsored bakeoffs brought new researchers to the field, and bridged early topics to modern probabilistic approaches. Last, we identify steep increases in author retention during the bakeoff era and the modern era, suggesting two points at which the field became more integrated.