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Twenty years of statistical learning: from language, back to machine learning

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Abstract

Twenty years ago, Saffran et al. (Science 274:1926–1928, 1996) published a paper in the prestigious journal Science, proposing statistical learning as a key learning process to explain how infants acquire their first words. The current paper presents an overview of how this publication has impacted the scientific community under a bibliometric perspective. Documents citing that paper were searched on the Web of Science Core Collection. Its evolution over time has been analyzed, most productive journals and subject areas have been identified, and a keywords co-occurrence map has been created. Results show that statistical learning has spread widely around scientific areas out of Linguistics and Psychology, and has aroused the interest of researchers from other related areas such as Rehabilitation or Education and Educational Research.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that the term Statistical Learning does not exist in the WoS keywords plus library, and this is why it does not appear in the analyses, although it should be considered as an implicit concept in which all other keywords can be related to.

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Correspondence to Toni Cunillera.

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Cunillera, T., Guilera, G. Twenty years of statistical learning: from language, back to machine learning. Scientometrics 117, 1–8 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2856-x

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