(i) people in NLP actually bothering to tell others why their approach is interesting
(ii) other people being interested in the same / a similar kind of thing [avoiding the discipline-of-one problem that niche AI applications would have] and
(iii) NLP having a reasonably developed "canon" about what counts as must-cite papers. This canon is heavily biased towards US work, and towards people who write decent explanations of what they do, but at least it makes sure that people know about the big problems and failed (or not-quite-failed-as-badly-as-the-others) solutions.
What you see in other conferences is that the "Best paper" awards get to (i) more theoretical papers which still have issues to solve before people can use the approach (nothing wrong with those!), in (ii) subfields that are currently "hot". Whereas the most-cited papers are (i) more obviously about things that a dedicated person could apply in practice, and (ii) in a subfield that is obscure at the time but will become more popular in the following years.
And a survey paper in the field of big data analysis (survey papers are citation bate, but won't be pulling in many grants or awards).
Although if it does, I suspect it has more to do with the fact that there's a product & marketing around it.
What I mean is, if a paper makes me think "wow, I've never though of this that way before, I wonder if I could try something like that with this...." I probably wouldn't cite it, right? Its not directly related. But I would probably give it an award for best paper because it helped me come up with a new approach to my own problem.
disclaimer: I am not a scientist.
That being said, I think you're onto something. I was recently involved in a project leading to a paper for a conference, and while I don't know whether it'll get accepted (meaning I don't know if it's even representative of the kinds of papers conferences want to see), I notice in hindsight that we had only a few citations that really informed a totally novel methodological approach we used. By contrast, we cited a ton of research in the domain area we studied.
So my takeaway is that it's hard to bring in dozens of papers to inform one's methods necessarily because methods (like a protocol) require one somewhat coherent narrative. Integrating the collective body of knowledge about a topic (like, oh let's say.. online labor markets) is a lot easier, making "rapid-fire" citations in that context more likely.
I'd like to see a seasoned researcher (or at least someone with the experience of a few publications) weigh in on this though.
Another issue is that "best paper" competitions tend to attract younger scientists who don't have the same "star power" to generate citations.
Star power in science is nothing to scoff at either. If Einstein was still about and writing papers you can be sure everyone and their grandmother would cite them, even if the papers were useless. Now, while that is an extreme example, many fields have their own "stars" that are credited with making significant gains in a particular area.
At all CS conferences I know of, 'best papers' are selected from all accepted submissions without the authors having a say.
Anecdotally, I know of awesome papers that were not selected as "best paper" and 'cute idea' papers without substance that got a "best paper" award.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval#Mean_aver...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval#Average_p...
Einstien won his Nobel for work on the photoelectric effect, not relativity, though obviously the latter mattered more.
The photoelectric effect led to quantum mechanics and the associated science and technology. I don't think it's obvious that relativity mattered more. If you judge by day-to-day use, one could plausibly argue that our understanding of quantum mechanics has a bigger impact.
"The papers acknowledged by the best paper award committee were not cited more often than a random sample of papers from the same years."
[1] http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2009/scientometricAnalys...
edit_ Perhaps I should clarify: It's entirely possible that exposure in the West has a large part to do with the media, who often don't wade too deeply into scientific matters.
