DRIFT: A Toolkit for Diachronic Analysis of Scientific Literature
Abheesht Sharma, Gunjan Chhablani, Harshit Pandey, Rajaswa Patil · 2021
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.