​This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental concepts and ideas in natural language processing (NLP), and to get them up to speed with current research in the area. It covers syntactic, semantic and discourse processing models, emphasizing machine learning or corpus-based methods and algorithms. It also covers applications of these methods and models in syntactic parsing, information extraction, statistical machine translation, dialogue systems, and summarization. Research papers of high impact published recently in the literature will be provided as reading assignments.​