  Impressive performance of pre-trained models has garnered public attention
and made news headlines in recent years. Almost always, these models are
produced by or in collaboration with industry. Using them is critical for
competing on natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks and correspondingly
to stay relevant in NLP research. We surveyed 100 papers published at EMNLP
2022 to determine the degree to which researchers rely on industry models,
other artifacts, and contributions to publish in prestigious NLP venues and
found that the ratio of their citation is at least three times greater than
what would be expected. Our work serves as a scaffold to enable future
researchers to more accurately address whether: 1) Collaboration with industry
is still collaboration in the absence of an alternative or 2) if NLP inquiry
has been captured by the motivations and research direction of private
corporations.
