  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: https://github.com/rajaswa/DRIFT.
