The growth of interest in NLP technology, fuelled largely by investment in AI applications, has been accompanied by unprecedented expansion of the preeminent NLP conferences: ACL, NAACL and EMNLP in particular. Grzegorz Chrupała’s graph shows the rapid growth in submissions to each conference in recent years:
These trends can also be seen in the blog post by the ACL 2019 Chairs. Meanwhile, acceptance rates have tended to remain constant, meaning that the conferences have grown in line with submissions, e.g. from ACL 2019:
NLP has developed as a field narrowly focused on English, a point highlighted by the recent emergence (and need for) the #BenderRule. The ability of NLP models to deal with English is important, due to its status as an international language of politics, commerce and culture, and indeed with these tools we can handle, for instance, more than half the content on the internet. But with such a strong focus on English we miss cross-linguistic insights and lack coverage for the majority of languages in the world.