How beginners consult the field of natural language processing (NLP) academic data

Original Address http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_574a437f01019poo.html

Yesterday in the lab, a group of students sent an e-mail to ask me how to find academic papers, which reminds me of my first graduate students in a daze si gu situation: watching seniors talk about the field dynamics, but do not know how to get started. After a few years of graduate school, it is now possible to confidently know where to go to learn the latest research developments. I think this may be a common puzzle for beginners, rather than just telling one person how to write down these folk knowledge to reduce the hassle of more people. Of course, this summary is just a talk, only hope that someone can get a little benefit, by the personal cognition limit, inevitably exhaustive, but also hope that everyone haihan correct.

1. International academic organizations, academic conferences and academic papers

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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 own 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, which will also hold a sub-annual meeting in North America and Europe, respectively, known as Naacl and Eacl. In addition, the ACL Institute has a number of special interest groups (special interest Groups,sigs), gathered in nlp/cl different sub-fields of scholars, the nature of a college campus interest community. Among them are more famous such as Sigdat (linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP), SIGNLL (Natural Language Learning) and so on. These sigs will also hold some international academic conferences, of which the more famous is the EMNLP of Sigdat organization (Conference on empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing) and SIGNLL organization CONLL (Conference on Natural Language learning). There is also an established NLP/CL Academic organization International Committee on Computational Linguistics, which organizes every two years a 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 in these meetings.

As the greatest happiness of scholars in the field of NLP/CL, the ACL Institute website has established a page called ACL Anthology (url:http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/), which supports the free download of most international academic conference papers in this field, Even includes academic conferences sponsored by other organizations, such as Coling, IJCNLP, and support for full-text search based on Google, which is a stand-alone, NLP paper I have. Since the collection of this paper is very large and open to access, many scholars are also based on it to carry out research, providing richer retrieval support, the specific entry can refer to the ACL anthology page above the search box to the right of the different retrieval buttons.

Similar to most computer disciplines, due to the rapid development of technology, the NLP/CL field attaches more importance to publishing academic conference papers because of the short publication cycle and the ability to communicate through meetings. Of course, NLP/CL also has its own flagship academic journal, 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 issue, the average quality is higher than the conference papers, time permitting is worth tracking in a timely manner. In addition, the ACL Institute has just started the transactions of ACL (tacl,url:http://www.transacl.org/) in order to improve its academic influence, which deserves attention. It is worth mentioning that these two journals are also open to access. There are also some journals related to NLP/CL, such as ACM transactions on Speech and Language PROCESSING,ACM transactions on Asian Language information Proc Essing,journal of quantitative linguistics and so on.

ACL, EMNLP, Naacl, COLING, LREC, computational linguistics are located in the top 5, according to Google Scholar Metrics's 2013 review of NLP/CL academic journals and conferences. Basically reflects the attention of scholars in the field.

NLP/CL as an interdisciplinary subject, its related fields also deserve attention. Mainly includes the following aspects: (1) Information retrieval and data mining field. The relevant academic conferences are mainly organized by the American Computer Society (ACM), including Sigir, WWW, WSDM and so on; (2) Artificial intelligence field. The relevant academic conference mainly includes AAAI and IJCAI, the related academic periodicals mainly include artificial intelligence and Journal of AI Research; (3) Machine learning field, the relevant academic conference mainly includes Icml,nips, Aistats,uai, the related academic periodicals mainly include Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) and machine learning (ML) and so on. For example, the recent rise of the Knowledge Graph research paper has been published in a significant part of the conferences and journals in the field of artificial intelligence and information retrieval. In fact, the National Computer Society (CCF) has developed the "China Computer Society recommended International Academic conference and periodical Catalogue" (HTTP://WWW.CCF.ORG.CN/SITES/CCF/ABOUTPM.JSP?CONTENTID=2567814757463), This list provides a quick overview of 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, noteworthy. I often look at his comments about ACLs, NAACL and other academic meetings, and the review of the paper, very inspiring. In addition, the ACL learned to maintain a wiki page (http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/), contains a large number of NLP/CL related information, such as the famous research institutions, the previous conference recruitment rate, and so on, are necessary for home good products, is worth digging deep.

2. Domestic academic organizations, academic conferences and academic papers

Similar to the international, there is also a NLP/CL-related society, called the Chinese Information Society (url:http://www.cipsc.org.cn/). Through the Association of Directors List (http://www.cipsc.org.cn/lingdao.php) basic can understand the domestic engaged in NLP/CL main units and scholars. The Institute organizes a number of academic conferences each year, such as the National Conference on Computational Linguistics (CCL), the National Symposium on Computing 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 the domestic NLP/CL scholars. In particular, the National Symposium on Youth Computing Linguistics is an academic conference dedicated to domestic NLP/CL graduate students, from the organization to the review by the field of graduate students, very unique, but also nlp/cl students academic exchanges, rapid growth of good places. It is worth mentioning that the coling in Beijing in 2010 and the ACL to be held in Beijing in 2015 are the main contractors, which partly reflects the importance of learning in the field of domestic nlp/cl. In addition, the Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese computing (NLP&CC), organized by the Computer Society Chinese Information Technology Commission, is also an important academic conference recently developed. The Chinese Information Society has edited a long history of the Journal of Chinese Information, which is an important academic periodical in the field, and has published many heavyweight papers. In addition, the domestic famous "Computer journal", "Software Journal" and other periodicals also often have NLP/CL papers published, it deserves attention.

In the past few years, the AI and NLP layouts on the water-wood Community BBS have been an important platform for online exchange discussions in the domestic NLP/CL field. With the development of social media in recent years, more and more scholars have moved to Sina Weibo, which has a strong communication atmosphere. How to find these scholars, a simple way is to search the Sina Weibo "looking for people" function to retrieve "natural language Processing", "Computational Linguistics", "Information Retrieval", "machine learning" and other words, immediately to the past only in the paper to see the name of teachers and classmates close to the exchange. There is also a way, Tsinghua University Liang bin Development of the "microblog Tracing" system (http://xunren.thuir.org/) can search each area of influential people, so can also be used to find important scholars in the Nlp/cl field. It is worth mentioning that a lot of teachers and students who teach abroad are also active in Sina Weibo, such as William Wang (http://weibo.com/u/1657470871), Li Yu (http://weibo.com/mli65), and so on, often explosive material industry news, Deserves attention. Also, the domestic NLP/CL famous blog is 52NLP (http://www.52nlp.cn/), the influence is relatively big. In short, academic research requires both hard work and communication with people. The so-called speaker is not intentional, listener heart, perhaps other people's words can wake up your puzzled long problem. Undoubtedly, blog microblogging and so provide a very good communication platform, of course, also pay attention not to indulge oh.

3. How to quickly understand the progress of a field

Finally, a quick overview of the progress of research in a field of experience. You will find that search engine is an important tool to access the literature, especially Google Scholar, because of its huge index, it will be our tool.

When you need to know a certain area, if you can find a new research summary of this field, it is Jingxiang more. The most convenient way is to search for "domain name + survey/review/tutorial/review" in Google Scholar. There are also publishers who specialize in publishing articles in various fields, such as now publisher's foundations and Trends series, Morgan & Claypool Publisher's synthesis lectures on Human Language Technologies series and so on. They have published a number of popular directions, such as document summaries, sentiment analysis and opinion mining, learning sequencing, and language models.

If the direction newness does not have a relevant review, it is generally possible to find the latest papers published in that direction, read their "related work" chapters, and follow the list of references to get a basic understanding of the relevant research context. There are, of course, many other options, such as going to videolectures.net to see the tutorial reports of famous academics at major academic conferences or summer schools, to consult directly with researchers in this field, and so on.

How beginners consult the field of natural language processing (NLP) academic data