Who should I Collaborate with? A Comparative Study of Academia and Industry Research Collaboration in NLP

TL;DR

This study analyzes the impact and trends of collaboration between academia and industry in NLP research, revealing increased joint publications with higher impact.

Contribution

It introduces a pipeline for extracting affiliation data and provides empirical insights into collaboration trends and their effects on research impact in NLP.

Findings

Growth in industry and hybrid NLP publications

Collaborations tend to have higher impact

Empirical evidence of collaboration trends

Abstract

The goal of our research was to investigate the effects of collaboration between academia and industry on Natural Language Processing (NLP). To do this, we created a pipeline to extract affiliations and citations from NLP papers and divided them into three categories: academia, industry, and hybrid (collaborations between academia and industry). Our empirical analysis found that there is a trend towards an increase in industry and academia-industry collaboration publications and that these types of publications tend to have a higher impact compared to those produced solely within academia.