“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination” – Albert Einstein

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an area of study in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that deals with developing programs for Computers to understand human natural languages. Until 1980, NLP systems were developed completely based on hand-written rules which suffered from certain limitations.  Later on, the introduction of Machine Learning techniques has completely revolutionized the development of NLP systems which have proven to perform better.

Top NLP Books:

• Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin (2018) An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, Third Edition (Draft).
• Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin (2008) An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, Second Edition. Prentice Hall.
• Christopher Manning and Hinrich Schütze (1999) Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT Press.

Top Core NLP Conferences (in no particular order):

• ACL: Association for Computational Linguistics
• EMNLP: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
• NAACL: North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• EACL: European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• COLING: International Conference on Computational Linguistics
• CoNLL: Conference on Natural Language Learning
• LREC: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
• IJCNLP: International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
• CICLing:  International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing
• RANLP: Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
• ICON: International Conference on Natural Language Processing