The spike of the "attention" term in mid-to-late 2017 is when the word clearly shifted from its more general meaning to the ML associated definition... at least among certain fields/disciplines anyway.

This a somewhat surreal split between the average population and the ML folks — I've came across many more instances of the term used to refer to its technical definition than the general one.

(The "Attention Is All You Need" paper was submitted to arXiv around that time.)