"Dialogue" vs "Dialog" in NLP and AI research: Statistics from a Confused Discourse

TL;DR

This paper investigates the inconsistent use of 'dialogue' and 'dialog' in NLP and AI research, analyzing publication trends, author behaviors, and linguistic factors over 20 years to understand the underlying reasons for this divergence.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive statistical analysis of spelling variations in research papers and explores potential linguistic and cultural factors influencing this inconsistency.

Findings

72% of top papers use 'dialogue', 24% use 'dialog'

No clear trend of change over 20 years

Limited influence of context on spelling choice

Abstract

Within computing research, there are two spellings for an increasingly important term - dialogue and dialog. We analyze thousands of research papers to understand this "dialog(ue) debacle". Among publications in top venues that use "dialog(ue)" in the title or abstract, 72% use "dialogue", 24% use "dialog", and 5% use both in the same title and abstract. This split distribution is more common in Computing than any other academic discipline. We investigate trends over ~20 years of NLP/AI research, not finding clear evidence of a shift over time. Author nationality is weakly correlated with spelling choice, but far from explains the mixed use. Many prolific authors publish papers with both spellings. We use several methods (such as syntactic parses and LM embeddings) to study how dialog(ue) context influences spelling, finding limited influence. Combining these results together, we discuss different theories that might explain the dialog(ue) divergence.