Language processing in the era of deep learning

Natural Language Processing is a branch of artificial in- telligence brimful of intricate, sophisticated, and challenging tasks, such as machine translation, question answering, summarization, and so on. Thanks to the recent advances of deep learning, NLP applications have received an unprecedented boost in performance, generating growing in- terest from the Machine Learning community. However, even if recent techniques are starting to reach excellent performance on various tasks, there are still several problems that need to be solved, such as the compu- tational cost, the reproducibility of results, and the lack of interpretability. In this contribution, we provide a high-level overview of recent advances in NLP, the role of Machine Learning, and current research directions.