Rediscovering 25 years of discoveries in spoken language processing: a preliminary ISCA archive analysis

This paper aims at analyzing the content of the conferences contained in the ISCA Archive over the past 25 years. It follows a similar exercise that has been conducted within the Computational Linguistics community over 50 years of existence at the ACL conference in 2012, and a survey on the IEEE ICASSP conference series from 1976 to 1990, which served in the launching of the ESCA Eurospeech conference. It contains first an analysis of the evolution of the number of papers and authors over time, including their gender and nationality, and of the collaboration among authors. It then studies the references cited in the papers, including their authors and sources. It finally conducts an analysis of the evolution of the research topics within the community over time. The survey shows the present trends in the conference series and in the Spoken Language Processing scientific community. Conducting this survey also demonstrated the importance of a clear and unique identification of authors, papers and other sources to facilitate the analysis. This survey is preliminary, as many other aspects also deserve attention. But we hope it will help better understanding and forging our community in the global village.