DRIFT: A Toolkit for Diachronic Analysis of Scientific Literature

Abheesht Sharma, Gunjan Chhablani, Harshit Pandey, Rajaswa Patil


Abstract
In this work, we present to the NLP community, and to the wider research community as a whole, an application for the diachronic analysis of research corpora. We open source an easy-to-use tool coined DRIFT, which allows researchers to track research trends and development over the years. The analysis methods are collated from well-cited research works, with a few of our own methods added for good measure. Succinctly put, some of the analysis methods are: keyword extraction, word clouds, predicting declining/stagnant/growing trends using Productivity, tracking bi-grams using Acceleration plots, finding the Semantic Drift of words, tracking trends using similarity, etc. To demonstrate the utility and efficacy of our tool, we perform a case study on the cs.CL corpus of the arXiv repository and draw inferences from the analysis methods. The toolkit and the associated code are available here: https://github.com/rajaswa/DRIFT.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-demo.40
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Heike Adel, Shuming Shi
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
361–371
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.40
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.40
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abheesht Sharma, Gunjan Chhablani, Harshit Pandey, and Rajaswa Patil. 2021. DRIFT: A Toolkit for Diachronic Analysis of Scientific Literature. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 361–371, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DRIFT: A Toolkit for Diachronic Analysis of Scientific Literature (Sharma et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.40.pdf
Software:
 2021.emnlp-demo.40.Software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.40.mp4
Code
 rajaswa/DRIFT