Lecture, four hours; discussion, two hours; outside study, six hours. Natural language processing (NLP) enables computers to understand and process human languages. NLP techniques have been widely used in many applications, including machine translation, question answering, machine summarization, and information extraction. Study of fundamental elements and recent trends in NLP. Students gain ability to apply NLP techniques in text-orientated applications, understand machine learning and algorithms used in NLP, and propose new approaches to solve NLP problems. Letter grading.