• Linguistics and Language -> Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing

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Which countries have invested the most in natural language processing research?

Annemarie Klehyn

So, I was just asked a pretty interesting question: "Which countries have invested the most in natural language processing research?" Honestly, I have no idea, but I'm willing to do a bit of research and give my best shot at answering this.

First of all, let me just clarify what natural language processing (NLP) is for those who don't know. Basically, it's a field of artificial intelligence that deals with teaching computers to understand human language. This includes things like speech recognition, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and more.

Anyway, back to the question at hand. After a little bit of googling, I came across a few resources that shed some light on this topic. One report I found was published by the International Data Corporation (IDC) in 2019, which ranked countries based on their spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, of which NLP is a part.

According to the report, the top five spending countries in this category were the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany. However, it's important to note that this isn't a direct measure of investment specifically in NLP research.

Another report I found was from Emerj, an AI research firm, which focused specifically on NLP. They looked at research publications related to NLP from 2014 to 2019 and ranked countries based on the number of publications produced.

According to their findings, the top three NLP research countries were the United States, China, and the United Kingdom. Again, this isn't a perfect measure of investment in NLP, as it doesn't take into account things like funding for research or number of NLP patents filed.

So, all in all, it seems like the United States, China, and the United Kingdom are some of the leading countries when it comes to NLP research and investment. However, I'm sure there are many other factors at play here, and it's possible that other countries are making significant strides in this field as well. But hey, that's just my best approximation based on the research I was able to find.