Paper Trends In Ion Conferences From 2007-2018

When designing a GNSS conference, one of the first steps is having individuals determine a set of tracks and sessions that are most likely to cover the topic areas of interest by those writing and submitting papers. While these decisions are made by experts in the field, it can be difficult to anticipate what topics will capture the attention of researchers and industry around the world. Furthermore, when submitting a paper, it can be hard to decide what sessions to submit a paper to when the work might lie at the intersection of several fields. As a first step to creating tools to helping the ION conference organizers decide on sessions for a conference and identifying papers that should be grouped together, this paper explores the ability to see trends in past data using commercially available natural language processing tools. Specifically, the abstract and title data for accepted papers from ION GNSS+ 2007-2018 are analyzed for different trends and patterns that can help inform future conference organization.