How beginners Consult Natural language processing (NLP) field academic materials

Yesterday, a group of students in the laboratory sent an e-mail to ask me how to find academic papers, which reminds me of my first graduate students at a loss of Si gu situation: watching the seniors talk about the field of dynamic, but do not know how to get started. After a few years of graduate students, now can finally confidently know where to learn the latest research trends. I think this may be a common puzzle for beginners, rather than just telling one person to know, it's better to write down these folk knowledge to reduce the number of people who have trouble. Of course, this summary is only a talk, hope that someone can get a little benefit from the personal cognitive limitations, unavoidably exhaustive, also hope that we haihan correct.

1. International academic organizations, academic conferences and academic papers

Natural Language Processing (natural language PROCESSING,NLP) is to a large extent coincident with computational linguistics (computational linguistics,cl). Similar to other computer disciplines, NLP/CL has one of its most authoritative international professional societies, called the Association for Computational Linguistics (acl,url:http://aclweb.org/), The association hosts the most authoritative international conference in the field of NLP/CL, the ACL annual meeting, and the ACL Society holds annual meetings in North America and Europe, called Naacl and Eacl respectively. In addition, the ACL society has a number of special interest groups (special interest Groups,sigs), gathered nlp/cl different fields of scholars, nature similar to a university campus interest in the community. Among them are more well-known such as Sigdat (linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP), SIGNLL (Natural Language), and so on. These sigs will also convene international academic conferences, among which the more famous are the emnlp of Sigdat (conference on empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing) and SIGNLL CONLL (Conference on Natural Language). In addition, there is a International Committee on Computational Linguistics's veteran NLP/CL academic organization, which organizes every two years a name called International Conference on The International Conference of Computational Linguistics (coling) is also an important academic meeting of NLP/CL. NLP/CL's main academic papers are distributed at these meetings.

The greatest happiness of scholars in the field of NLP/CL is that the ACL Web site builds a page called ACL Anthology (url:http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/), which supports the free download of most international academic conference papers in the field, It even includes academic conferences sponsored by other organizations, such as coling, IJCNLP, etc., and supports Full-text search based on Google, which is a standing hand, NLP paper I have. Because the collection of this paper is very large, and open access, many scholars also based on its research, provides a richer search support, the specific portal can refer to the ACL anthology page search box on the right side of different search buttons.

Similar to most computer disciplines, due to the rapid development of technology, the NLP/CL field attaches more importance to the publication of academic conference papers, due to the short publication cycle, and can be communicated through meetings. Of course, NLP/CL also has its own flagship academic journals, published a lot of classical academic papers, that is computational linguistics (Url:http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/coli). The journal has only a few articles per period, the average quality is higher than the conference papers, time permitting words worth tracking. In addition, the ACL society has just started the transactions of ACL (tacl,url:http://www.transacl.org/) in order to enhance academic influence, which is worth paying attention to. It is worth mentioning that these two periodicals are also open access. There are also periodicals related to NLP/CL, such as ACM transactions on Speech and Language PROCESSING,ACM transactions on Asian Language information Essing,journal of quantitative linguistics et cetera.

According to the Google Scholar Metrics 2013 evaluation of NLP/CL academic journals and conferences, ACL, EMNLP, Naacl, coling, Lrec, computational linguistics are located in the top 5 places, It basically reflects the degree of concern of scholars in this field.

NLP/CL as an interdisciplinary subject, its related fields also deserves attention. Mainly includes the following several aspects: (1) Information retrieval and data mining field. Related academic conferences are mainly sponsored by the American Computer Society (ACM), including Sigir, WWW, WSDM, etc. (2) Artificial intelligence field. Related academic conferences mainly include AAAI and IJCAI, and related academic periodicals mainly include artificial intelligence and Journal of AI Research; (3) machine learning, related academic conferences mainly include icml,nips, Aistats,uai, and other related academic periodicals mainly include Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) and Machine Learning (ML). For example, the recently emerging Knowledge Graph research paper is published in a large number of conferences and periodicals in the field of artificial intelligence and information retrieval. In fact, the National Computer Society (CCF) has developed a catalogue of international academic conferences and periodicals recommended by the China Computer Society (http://www.ccf.org.cn/sites/ccf/aboutpm.jsp?contentId=2567814757463), Through this list, you can quickly understand the major journals and academic conferences in each area.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the United States Hal DAUMÉIII maintained a Natural language Processing blog (http://nlpers.blogspot.com/), often commenting on the latest academic developments, deserves attention. I often read his comments on the conference of the ACL, NAACL and other academic conferences, which is very enlightening. In addition, the ACL learned to maintain a wiki page (http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/), including a large number of NLP/CL related information, such as well-known research institutions, the previous meeting rate, and so on, are necessary for home products, it is worth digging deep.

2. Domestic academic organizations, academic conferences and academic papers

Similar to the international, there is also a society related to nlp/cl, called the Chinese Information Society (url:http://www.cipsc.org.cn/). Through the Institute of the Board of Directors (http://www.cipsc.org.cn/lingdao.php) can basically understand the domestic engaged in the nlp/cl of the main units and scholars. The Institute organizes many academic conferences every year, such as the National Academic Conference on Computational Linguistics (CCL), the National Symposium on Youth Computational Linguistics (YCCL), the National Conference on Information Retrieval (CCIR), the National Machine Translation Seminar (CWMT), etc., which is an important platform for academic exchanges among domestic NLP/CL scholars. In particular, it is worth mentioning that the National Symposium on Computational Linguistics for young people is dedicated to domestic NLP/CL graduate students of the academic conference, from the Organization to the review by the field of postgraduate students, very distinctive, but also nlp/cl students academic exchanges, rapid growth of good places. It is worth mentioning that the 2010 in Beijing Coling and 2015 will be held in Beijing ACL, the Institute is the main undertaker, which also reflects the academic society in the domestic nlp/cl field important position. In addition, the Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese computing (NLP&CC), organized by the Chinese Information Technology Committee of the Computer Society, is also an important academic meeting of the recent rise. The Chinese information Society editor-in-chief has a long history of "Chinese Information journal", which is an important academic periodical in this field, and has published many heavy papers. In addition, the domestic famous "Computer journal", "Software Journal" and other periodicals are often published NLP/CL papers, worthy of concern.

In the past few years, the AI and NLP suites in the water wood Community BBS have been an important platform for online communication discussions in domestic NLP/CL field. In recent years with the development of social media, more and more scholars to the Sina Weibo, there is a strong communication atmosphere. How to find these scholars, a simple way is in Sina Weibo search "Find someone" function to retrieve "natural language Processing", "computational linguistics," Information Retrieval "," machine learning ", and so on, immediately with the past only in the paper to see the name of the teachers and students close to the exchange. There is also a way, Tsinghua University Liang Development of the "micro-Blog Tracing" System (http://xunren.thuir.org/) can retrieve the influential people in each field, so can also be used to find important scholars in the Nlp/cl field. It is worth mentioning that many teachers and students in foreign schools are also active in Sina Weibo, such as William Wang (http://weibo.com/u/1657470871), Li Yu (http://weibo.com/mli65), often burst material industry news, Worthy of concern. Also, the domestic NLP/CL famous blog is 52NLP (http://www.52nlp.cn/), the impact is relatively large. In a word, academic research needs both hard skills and communication with others. The so-called speaker has no intention, the listener is intentional, perhaps other people's words can wake up your puzzling question. Undoubtedly, blog Weibo and so on provide a very good platform for communication, of course, also pay attention not to indulge oh.

3. How to quickly understand the progress of research in a field

Finally, a quick understanding of the progress of research in a field of experience. You will find that the search engine is an important tool to look up the literature, especially Google Scholar Google, because of its huge index, will be a tool for us to hack.

When you need to know a field, it's much more Jingxiang to find a review of the latest research in the field. The easiest way to find it is to search for "domain name + survey/review/tutorial/summary" in Google Scholar. There are also a number of publishers specializing in publishing articles in various fields, such as the Foundations and trends series published by now publisher, Morgan & Claypool Publisher's synthesis lectures on Human Language Technologies series and so on. They have published a number of popular trends, such as document summaries, affective analysis and opinion mining, learning sequencing, language models, and so on.

If there is no relevant review of direction Tainu, it is generally possible to find the latest papers published in that direction, read their "related work" chapters, and follow the listed references to the basic understanding of the relevant research context. Of course, there are many other options, such as going to the videolectures.net to see the tutorial reports made by famous academics at major academic conferences or summer schools, to directly consult researchers in this field, and so on.