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Yesterday, a student who just joined the lab sent me an email asking me how to find an academic paper, which reminded me of the situation when I was a graduate student: I watched my seniors talk about the field dynamics and didn't know how to get started. After several years of contact with graduate students, I can finally confidently know where to go and understand the latest scientific research trends. I think this may be the confusion of beginners. Instead of telling only one person, it is better to write down these folk knowledge and reduce trouble for more people. Of course, this summary is just a family statement. I just hope someone can get a little benefit from it. Due to personal cognition, it is inevitable to miss it. Please correct me.
1. International academic organizations, conferences and papers
Natural language processing is consistent with computational linguistics to a great extent. Similar to other computer disciplines, NLP/CL has its own most authoritative international professional society called the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL, URL:ACL Home Page). This association has held the most authoritative international conference in NLP/CL, namely ACL Annual Meeting, and ACL Society will also hold annual meetings in North America and Europe, called NAACL and EAACL respectively. In addition, ACL Society also has several special interest groups (SIGs), which gather scholars from different sub-fields of NLP/CL, and are similar in nature to interest groups on university campuses. Among them, Sigdat (natural language processing method based on language data and corpus) and SIGNLL (natural language learning) are famous. These SIGs will also hold some international academic conferences, among which the famous ones are EMNLP (Intelligent Method Conference on Natural Language Processing) organized by SIGDAT and CONLL (Natural Language Learning Conference) organized by SIGNLL. In addition, there is an old academic organization of NLP/CL called International Computerized Logistics Committee, which organizes an international conference every two years called International Computerized Logistics Conference (Colin), which is also an important academic conference of NLP/CL. The main academic papers of NLP/CL are distributed at these meetings.
As a scholar in NLP/CL field, the greatest happiness is that ACL Society website has set up a page called ACL anthology (URL:ACL anthology), which supports the free download of most international academic conference papers in this field, even including academic conferences sponsored by other organizations, such as COLING and IJCNLP. And support the full-text search function based on Google, which can be described as one stop in hand. I have NLP papers. Because this collection of papers is very large and can be accessed openly, many scholars have also carried out research based on it and provided richer retrieval support. Please refer to the different search buttons on the right side of the search box at the top of ACL anthology page for specific entries.
Similar to most computer disciplines, due to the rapid development of technology, NLP/CL pays more attention to the publication of academic conference papers, because the publication cycle is short and communication can be carried out through conferences. Of course, NLP/CL also has its own flagship academic journal, and has published many classic academic papers, namely "Computational Logistics" (URL: MIT press journals). There are only a few articles in each issue of this journal, and the average quality is higher than that of conference papers, so it is worth tracking in time when time permits. In addition, in order to improve its academic influence, ACL Society has just set up ACL (URL: ISSN: 2307-387x), which deserves attention. It is worth mentioning that these two periodicals are also open access. In addition, there are some journals related to NLP/CL, such as ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, etc.
According to the evaluation of NLP/CL academic journals and conferences by Google Academic Metrics 20 13, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLING, LREC and computational linguistics rank in the top five, which basically reflects the importance attached by scholars to this field.
NLP/CL is an interdisciplinary subject, and its related fields are also worthy of attention. It mainly includes the following aspects: (1) information retrieval and data mining. Related academic conferences are mainly sponsored by ACM, including SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, etc. (2) The field of artificial intelligence. Related academic conferences mainly include AAAI and IJCAI, and related academic journals mainly include artificial intelligence and AI research magazines; . (3) In the field of machine learning, relevant academic conferences mainly include ICML, NIPS, AISTATS, UAI, etc. Related academic journals mainly include Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) and Machine Learning (ML). For example, a considerable number of recent research papers on knowledge maps have been published in conferences and journals in the fields of artificial intelligence and information retrieval. In fact, china computer federation (CCF) has compiled the Catalogue of International Academic Conferences and Journals Recommended by China Computer Federation (CCF Recommended Ranking). Through this list, you can quickly understand the main journals and academic conferences in various fields.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that Hal Daumé III in the United States maintains a natural language processing blog, which often comments on the latest academic trends and deserves attention. It is very enlightening to often see his ideas of attending academic conferences such as ACL and NAACL and his comments on papers. In addition, ACL Society also maintains a Wiki page (ACL Wiki), which contains a lot of information about NLP/CL, such as famous research institutions and the employment rate of previous conferences. , are home essential products, worth digging.
2. Domestic academic organizations, conferences and papers
Similar to the world, there is also an NLP/CL-related society in China called China Chinese Information Society (URL). Through the list of directors of the Institute (China Institute of Chinese Information), we can basically understand the main units and scholars engaged in NLP/CL in China. The Society organizes many academic conferences every year, such as the National Conference on Computational Linguistics (CCL), the National Symposium on Computational Linguistics for Teenagers (YCCL), the National Conference on Information Retrieval (CCIR), and the National Symposium on Machine Translation (CWMT). It is an important platform for academic exchanges among NLP/CL scholars in China. It is particularly worth mentioning that the National Youth Symposium on Computational Linguistics is an academic conference specially aimed at domestic NLP/CL graduate students, and it is organized by graduate students in this field from organization to peer review. It is very distinctive, and it is also a good place for NLP/CL students' academic exchange and rapid growth. It is worth mentioning that COLING held in Beijing on 20 10 and ACL to be held in Beijing on 20 15 are the main organizers, which also reflects the important position of the Institute in the domestic NLP/CL field to some extent. In addition, the Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLP & amp； CC) is also an important academic conference that has recently emerged. China Information Journal, edited by China Information Society, is an important academic journal in this field in China, and has published many heavyweight papers. In addition, NLP/CL papers are often published in famous domestic journals such as China Computer Journal and Journal of Software, which deserves attention.
In the past few years, the AI and NLP pages opened on Shui Mu community BBS were once an important platform for online communication and discussion in NLP/CL field in China. In recent years, with the development of social media, more and more scholars have moved to Sina Weibo, and Sina Weibo has a strong communication atmosphere. A simple way to find these scholars is to search for the words "natural language processing", "computational linguistics", "information retrieval" and "machine learning" in the "find people" function of Sina Weibo search, and you will be able to communicate with teachers and students who only saw their names in papers in the past. There's another way. Tsinghua University Liang Bin's "Searching for People in Weibo" system (Tsinghua University Information Retrieval Group) can search influential people in every field, so it can also be used to find important scholars in NLP/CL field. It is worth mentioning that many teachers and students who teach abroad are also active on Sina Weibo, such as Wang Weilian and Li Mu, who often break the news in the industry and deserve attention. There is also NLP/CL. The famous blog in China is 52nlp (I love natural language processing), which has a great influence. In a word, academic research needs both hard work and communication with people. The so-called speaker has no intention, but the listener has a heart. Maybe a word from others can wake up the problem that you have been thinking for a long time. Undoubtedly, blogs such as Weibo provide a good platform for communication, but of course, we should be careful not to indulge.
3. How to quickly understand the research progress in a certain field?
Finally, briefly talk about the experience of quickly understanding the research progress in a certain field. You will find that the search engine is an important tool for consulting literature, especially the Google Academic provided by Google. Because of its huge index, it will be a sharp weapon for us to overcome difficulties.
When you need to know a certain field, if you can find the latest research summary in this field, you will save a lot of effort. The most convenient way is to search "domain name+survey/review/tutorial/summary" in Google Academic. There are also some publishing houses that specialize in publishing comprehensive articles in various fields, such as the series Fundamentals and Trends published by NOW Publisher, Morgan &; A series of comprehensive lectures on human language technology published by Claypool Press. They have published many popular comments, such as document abstracts, sentiment analysis and opinion mining, learning sequencing, language models and so on.
If the direction is too new and there is no relevant review, you can generally consult the latest published papers in this direction, read its "related work" chapter, and basically understand the relevant research context according to the listed references. Of course, there are many other ways, such as going to see the counseling reports made by famous scholars at major academic conferences or summer schools, and consulting researchers in this field directly.