# Revealing the Technology Development of Natural Language Processing: A Scientific Entity-Centric Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29836 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29836/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [TDMSci: A Specialized Corpus for Scientific Literature Entity Tagging of Tasks Datasets and Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10273/) (2021)
- [NLPExplorer: Exploring the Universe of NLP Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07351/) (2019)
- [Entitymetrics: Measuring the Impact of Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.2486/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Exploring the relationship between team institutional composition and novelty in academic papers based on fine-grained knowledge entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31058/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Scientific Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models: A Type-driven Multi-task Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08636/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most studies on technology development have been conducted from a thematic perspective, but the topics are coarse-grained and insufficient to accurately represent technology. The development of automatic entity recognition techniques makes it possible to extract technology-related entities on a large scale. Thus, we perform a more accurate analysis of technology development from an entity-centric perspective. To begin with, we extract technology-related entities such as methods, datasets, metrics, and tools in articles on Natural Language Processing (NLP), and we apply a semi-automatic approach to normalize the entities. Subsequently, we calculate the z-scores of entities based on their co-occurrence networks to measure their impact. We then analyze the development trends of new technologies in the NLP domain since the beginning of the 21st century. The findings of this paper include three aspects: Firstly, the continued increase in the average number of entities per paper implies a growing burden on researchers to acquire relevant technical background knowledge. However, the emergence of pre-trained language models has injected new vitality into the technological innovation of the NLP domain. Secondly, Methods dominate among the 179 high-impact entities. An analysis of the z-score trend about the top 10 entities reveals that pre-trained language models, exemplified by BERT and Transformer, have become mainstream in recent years. Unlike the trend of the other eight method entities, the impact of Wikipedia dataset and BLEU metric has continued to rise in the long term. Thirdly, in recent years, there has been a remarkable surge in popularity for new high-impact technologies than ever before, and their acceptance by researchers has accelerated at an unprecedented speed. Our study provides a new perspective on analyzing technology development in a specific domain.