Do we Name the Languages we Study? The #BenderRule in LREC and ACL articles
Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022)
Abstract
This article studies the application of the #BenderRule in Natural Language Processing (NLP) articles according to two dimensions. Firstly, in a contrastive manner, by considering two major international conferences, LREC and ACL, and secondly, in a diachronic manner, by inspecting nearly 14,000 articles over a period of time ranging from 2000 to 2020 for LREC and from 1979 to 2020 for ACL. For this purpose, we created a corpus from LREC and ACL articles from the above-mentioned periods, from which we manually annotated nearly 1,000. We then developed two classifiers to automatically annotate the rest of the corpus. Our results show that LREC articles tend to respect the #BenderRule (80 to 90% of them respect it), whereas 30 to 40% of ACL articles do not. Interestingly, over the considered periods, the results appear to be stable for the two conferences, even though a rebound in ACL 2020 could be a sign of the influence of the blog post about the #BenderRule.