Impact of COVID -19 in Natural Language Processing Publications: a Disaggregated Study in Gender, Contribution and Experience (2021)

Abstract: This study sheds light on the effects of COVID-19 in the particular field of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing within Artificial Intelligence. We provide an inter-sectional study on gender, contribution, and experience that considers one school year (from August 2019 to August 2020) as a pandemic year. August is included twice for the purpose of an inter-annual comparison. While the trend in publications increased with the crisis, the results show that the ratio between female and male publications decreased. This only helps to reduce the importance of the female role in the scientific contributions of computational linguistics (it is now far below its peak of 0.24). The pandemic has a particularly negative effect on the production of female senior researchers in the first position of authors (maximum work), followed by the female junior researchers in the last position of authors (supervision or collaborative work).

## introduction the pandemic situation is a burden for everyone. given the uncertainty and pressure of the situation, it is expected to have a significant impact on the lives of researchers. however, it appears that women are bearing considerable burdens due to the social impact of the virus. according to the scientist article 1 , the pandemic exacerbates existing inequalities, with female researchers' output increasing less during the pandemic. this is due to several factors: housework, children staying at home, and many other factors. in our paper, we aim to investigate the effects on the productivity of female researchers during the pandemic in natural 1 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/gendergap-in-research-output-widens-during-pandemic-67665 processing field (nlp). women have long been underrepresented in nlp research. this fact leads to the question of whether the pandemic affects female nlp researchers more. we focus on testing the following hypothesis: ## impact statement this work is doing a binary gender study. in that sense, we are simplifying the real gender spectrum (d' @xcite . our motivation is because we want to study the effect of covid-19 in women, in the line of previous works @xcite . by highlighting the role of women in scientific contributions, we emphasize the importance of strengthening the educational programs, scientific grants and support that motivate woman in nlp and in stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in general. several studies that show the imbalance between females/males emerge with different objectives in nlp. we can assume three main categories that show imbalances: in our data, in the automatic representations from our systems and in the professional level. our study falls into this third category. data. similar to the study of the number of video frames in computer vision, e.g., @xcite , which analyses the number of dedicated frames for women and men, there is a study in nlp that examines the gender-specific references in the literature @xcite . this study shows a higher disproportion in mentioning men more than women. more than the disproportion, it is the role that men are usually associated with "highlevel" occupations compared to women who are associated with more "care-giving" occupations. ## discussion our discussion will target solving the hypothesis raised in section 1 together with additional ones. what is the effect of pandemic on nlp publications? our study examines the total production of nlp research during the year and the gender distribution. in the figure 2 , we observe an increase in the number of both female and male authors during the period from march to july 2020, which confirms hypothesis 1 from section 1. this may be explained by the fact that scientific work has gained popularity during the pandemic, together with the fact that working from a distance tends to leave more time for writing articles. ## conclusions the main goal here is to estimate the pandemic effect on the nlp production. the impact was studied in terms of gender, contribution and experience. when combining the three criteria, different effects are noted. in the first position (maximum contribution), the females/males proportion increases for juniors and decreases for seniors. this can be explained by the fact that the senior researchers had to take on more responsibility (family, care-giving) during the crisis, which prevented them from keeping up with scientific production. in the last position (supervision or collaboration contribution) the females/males proportion decreases for juniors and is kept stable for seniors. it could be speculated that female junior researchers were more neglected than male junior researchers in terms of small contributions when working at a distance.