He Said, She Said: Gender in the ACL Anthology

Studies of gender balance in academic computer science are typically based on statistics on enrollment and graduation. Going beyond these coarse measures of gender participation, we conduct a fine-grained study of gender in the field of Natural Language Processing. We use topic models (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to explore the research topics of men and women in the ACL Anthology Network. We find that women publish more on dialog, discourse, and sentiment, while men publish more than women in parsing, formal semantics, and finite state models. To conduct our study we labeled the gender of authors in the ACL Anthology mostly manually, creating a useful resource for other gender studies. Finally, our study of historical patterns in female participation shows that the proportion of women authors in computational linguistics has been continuously increasing, with approximately a 50% increase in the three decades since 1980.