A Diachronic Analysis of the NLP Research Paradigm Shift: When, How, and Why?

Understanding the fundamental concepts and trends in a scientific field is crucial for keeping abreast of its ongoing development. In this study, we propose a systematic framework for analyzing the evolution of research topics in a scientific field using causal discovery and inference techniques. By conducting extensive experiments on the ACL Anthology corpus, we demonstrate that our framework effectively uncovers evolutionary trends and the underlying causes for a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) research topics.