NLP White Paper – Overview 2025.7.18 Laboro.AI Inc. Lead ML Researcher Zhao Xinyi Introduction 日本語版(Japanese version)は こちら Over the past decade, NLP research has witnessed rapid advancements, with top-tier conferences such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and COLING serving as key venues for groundbreaking work. To better understand the evolution of research interests in the field, we analyzed academic papers from these conferences, applying topic modeling to identify key research directions and track their popularity over time. From this analysis, we carefully selected 40 significant topics that have shaped or are shaping the NLP landscape. This selection highlights both long-standing areas of interest and emerging trends that are gaining traction. We will roll out a series of articles, each diving deeper into a specific topic, revealing more data, and providing insights into its development, breakthroughs, challenges, and future potential. This overview, as the first in the series, presents a high-level analysis of these topics, focusing on how their popularity has evolved. For each year, we classify topics based on their relative strength compared to (1) other topics in the same year and (2) the same topic’s progression from the previous year: 1. Strong Topic Notable topic of the year with increase of strength from the previous year 2. Not Strong but Well Known (NSWK) Topic Notable topic of the year with decrease of strength from the previous year 3. Weak Topic Less studied topic of the year with increase of strength from the previous year 4. Latent Topic Less studied topic of the year with decrease of strength from the previous year After categorizing topics year by year, we analyze their long-term evolution and classify them into three broad groups based on their overall popularity trends and current status. Within each category, topics are further grouped into research areas based on their core focus. The three broad categories are: Established NLP Topics Fundamental areas that have been extensively studied over the years. Trending NLP Topics Areas that have gained strong research interest in recent years. Emerging NLP Topics Fast-growing topics with the potential to become major research focuses. Through this analysis, we hope to offer a concise yet insightful perspective on NLP research trends, helping researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals navigate the evolving landscape. Legend for Charts Below Contents ・ Established NLP Topics ・ 1. Core NLP Tasks: A Foundation Under Constant Refinement ・ 2. Model Architectures and Training Techniques ・ 3. Domain-Specific Applications ・ 4. Ethics, Fairness, and Reliability Established NLP Topics 1. Core NLP Tasks: Language Understanding and Generation As NLP continues to evolve, it’s worth taking a closer look at how core NLP tasks are trending in recent years. These tasks have long been central to the field and remain essential to real-world applications, from AI assistants to search engines and translation tools. Between 2017 and 2024, many foundational tasks have maintained consistently strong attention, including Machine Translation, Question Answering, and Text Summarization. At the same time, we’re also seeing increasing momentum in more nuanced or complex tasks, such as Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition, Metaphor Detection, and Text-To-SQL. Moreover, this evolution isn’t limited within text alone. We are also witnessing a steady rise in Multimodal NLP, areas that bring non-textual input into the landscape of core NLP capabilities. These trends suggest that foundational language tasks are no longer confined to plain text but are being reimagined to handle speech, vision, sign language, and even cognitive signals like eye-tracking. These emerging directions reflect a broadening of what we consider “core”. Rather than simply extracting or classifying text, today’s models are expected to handle rich context and multimodal input, while generating responses that are creative, coherent and human-like. NLP research is moving toward tasks that require deeper reasoning, natural interaction, and domain-specific adaptation. Large language models (LLMs) have enabled many of these advancements, performing a wide range of tasks with just a few examples or instructions. We’re seeing rapid progress in areas like Natural Language Reasoning, Contextual Response Generation, and Narrative Generation. However, LLMs have also introduced new challenges particularly around interpretability and reliability. In upcoming articles, we’ll explore how this expansion of core tasks is reshaping our understanding of what NLP systems can and should do. 2. Model Architectures and Training Techniques Over the past several years, progress in NLP has been tightly coupled with innovations in model architectures and training paradigms. While core NLP tasks define what models are expected to do, it is these underlying techniques that determine how well and how efficiently they can do it. From the refinement of transformer-based architectures to new techniques for improving robustness, efficiency, and adaptability, this area has been the engine behind recent breakthroughs in performance, scalability, and usability across a wide range of NLP applications. In the early days of Transformer-based language models, much attention was placed on pre-training massive models from scratch and optimizing self-supervised learning objectives. But as foundation models like BERT, T5 and GPT became widely available and increasingly capable, the community’s focus began to move away from pre-training itself. This is in part because pre-training is extremely expensive and requires massive infrastructure. Today, research and development efforts are largely centered around making better use of existing pre-trained models. Fine-tuning enables these models to adapt to new domains or specialized tasks. In-context learning allows them to perform new tasks with just a few examples without modifying model weights at all. Meanwhile, quantization is gaining traction as a way to run large models more efficiently, especially in resource-constrained settings. This trend reflects a broader shift: as foundation models stabilize, research has increasingly focused on improving their usability and adaptability. Efficiency and alignment with real-world needs have become central concerns in model architecture and training strategies. In upcoming articles, we’ll explore how these architectural and training innovations are shaping the direction of NLP research. 3. Domain-Specific Applications Recent advancements in NLP have led to increasing practical applications across diverse fields, where language use, terminology, and requirements differ significantly from general-purpose tasks. This section highlights four notable domains: Healthcare , e.g., for record analysis, literature extraction, and diagnosis Law , e.g., for legal document processing and research Chemical and biological informatics , e.g., for scientific data mining and discovery Music , e.g., for generation, classification, and sentiment analysis. Across all these areas, we’ve observed a steady increase of interest over the past several years. These applications are not merely experimental but are increasingly being integrated into real-world workflows and systems. This surge reflects both the maturity of NLP techniques and their adaptability to the unique challenges and nuances of various industries. As NLP continues to evolve, domain-specific applications are likely to deepen and diversify. In upcoming articles, we’ll explore how NLP technologies are being tailored to meet the demands of specialized fields, and how they’re reshaping workflows, decision-making, and innovation across a variety of industries. 4. Ethics, Fairness, and Reliability As language models become increasingly powerful and widespread, attention has turned toward ensuring that these systems are fair, ethical, and reliable. Key concerns include identifying and reducing harmful outputs, biased behavior, and factual inaccuracies, all of which are all critical for responsible real-world adoption. Research on gender bias and abusive language detection gained early traction and remains active. Their consistent strong signals reflect growing awareness around content moderation, platform safety, and equitable representation. While these long-standing issues remain central, there has been a notable rise in research on hallucinations, where language models generate confident but false or misleading information. Recent works have focused not only on detecting such errors but also on mitigating them. As NLP systems move into real-world environments, trustworthiness is becoming just as important as accuracy. In future articles, we’ll continue exploring how responsible AI practices in NLP have evolved, and how the field is working toward safer, fairer, and more dependable language technologies. Author Laboro.AI Inc. Lead ML Researcher Zhao Xinyi Xinyi Zhao is a lead researcher at Laboro.AI Inc. Her research focuses on natural language processing, machine learning, and kowledge graphs. She has contributed multiple open-source datasets and models, and her recent work explores real-world applications of large language models. She’s passionate about bridging academic research with practical use cases. 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