Scientific landscape on opportunities and challenges of large language models and natural language processing

Abstract

This paper conducted a systematic review of Scopus-indexed publications on large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) extracted in October 2023 to address the dearth of literature on their opportunities and challenges. Through bibliometric analysis, from the 1,600 relevant documents, the study explored research productivity, revealing both opportunities and challenges spanning research and real-world applications in education, medicine, and health care, citations, and keyword co-occurrence networks. Results highlighted distribution patterns and dominant players like Google LLC and Stanford University. Opportunities such as technological development in generative artificial intelligence (AI), were contrasted with challenges such as biases and ethical concerns. The intellectual structure analysis revealed prominent application areas in health and education and also emphasized issues such as AI divide and human-AI partnership. Improvement on the technology performance of LLM and NLP remains to be a challenge. Recommendations include further exploration of open research problems and bibliometric studies using other research databases given the research bias towards Scopus-indexed English publications.