Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a scientific discipline which is found at the intersection of fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, and Cognitive Psychology. Over four chapters, this book presents the state of the art and fundamental concepts of key NLP areas.

The first chapter covers the fundamental concepts in lexical semantics, lexical databases, knowledge representation paradigms, and ontologies. The second chapter focuses on combinatorial and formal semantics. Discourse and text representation, automatic discourse segmentation and interpretation, and anaphora resolution are the subject of the third chapter. Finally, the fourth chapter covers key aspects of large scale applications of NLP such as software architectures and their relations to cognitive models of NLP as well as the evaluation paradigms of NLP software. Furthermore, this chapter presents the main NLP applications such as Machine Translation (MT), Information Retrieval (IR), as well as Information Extraction from Big Data (event extraction, sentiment analysis and opinion mining).