Recent Developments in Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a dynamic and rapidly developing field in which new trends, techniques, and applications are constantly emerging. This chapter focuses mainly on recent developments in NLP which could not be covered in other chapters of the Handbook. Topics such as crowdsourcing and processing of large datasets, which are no longer that recent but are widely used and not covered at length in any other chapter, are also presented. The chapter starts by describing how the availability of tools and resources has had a positive impact on the field. The proliferation of user-generated content has led to the emergence of research topics such as sarcasm and irony detection, automatic assessment of user-generated content, and stance detection. All of these topics are discussed in the chapter. The field of NLP is approaching maturity, a fact corroborated by the latest developments in the processing of texts for financial purposes and for helping users with disabilities, two topics that are also discussed here. The chapter presents examples of how researchers have successfully combined research in computer vision and natural language processing to enable the processing of multimodal information, as well as how the latest advances in deep learning have revitalized research on chatbots and conversational agents. The chapter concludes with a comprehensive list of further reading material and additional resources.