Providing and Analyzing NLP Terms for our Community

By its own nature, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community is a priori the best equipped to study the evolution of its own publications, but works in this direction are rare and only recently have we seen a few attempts at charting the field. In this paper, we use the algorithms, resources, standards, tools and common practices of the NLP field to build a list of terms characteristic of ongoing research, by mining a large corpus of scientific publications, aiming at the largest possible exhaustivity and covering the largest possible time span. Study of the evolution of this term list through time reveals interesting insights on the dynamics of field and the availability of the term database and of the corpus (for a large part) make possible many further comparative studies in addition to providing a test field for a new graphic interface designed to perform visual time analytics of large sized thesauri.