<p>I have a feeling that this kind of question would make a good Wiki post if the question is posed to the effect of: "based on the frequency of keywords in peer-reviewed ML journals, conference proceedings, respected magazine articles, etc., what are the most popular topics?"</p>

<p>Such a list could be constantly updated as topics of interest evolve and, IMO, would certainly be a service to the community since they can help inform about the state-of-the-art. </p>

<p><strong>EDIT</strong>: incidentally, I just ran into a very interesting blog post from the folks at Mathworks that is close to what I was envisioning when I wrote this yesterday. See <a href="http://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2016/08/08/text-mining-machine-learning-research-papers-with-matlab/" rel="nofollow">here</a></p>
