  Recent advances in deep learning methods for natural language processing
(NLP) have created new business opportunities and made NLP research critical
for industry development. As one of the big players in the field of NLP,
together with governments and universities, it is important to track the
influence of industry on research. In this study, we seek to quantify and
characterize industry presence in the NLP community over time. Using a corpus
with comprehensive metadata of 78,187 NLP publications and 701 resumes of NLP
publication authors, we explore the industry presence in the field since the
early 90s. We find that industry presence among NLP authors has been steady
before a steep increase over the past five years (180% growth from 2017 to
2022). A few companies account for most of the publications and provide funding
to academic researchers through grants and internships. Our study shows that
the presence and impact of the industry on natural language processing research
are significant and fast-growing. This work calls for increased transparency of
industry influence in the field.
