Earlier this week I gave a talk called “Introduction to NLP” as part of a class I am currently teaching at the University of Notre Dame. This is an update of a talk I originally gave in 2010, whilst working for Endeca. I had intended to make a wholesale update to all the slides, but noticed that one of them was worth keeping verbatim: a snapshot of the state of the art back then (see slide 38). Less than a decade has passed since then (that’s a short time to me 
but there are some interesting and noticeable changes. For example, there is no word2vec, GloVe or fastText, or any of the neurally-inspired distributed representations and frameworks that are now so popular (let alone BERT, ELMo & the latest wave). Also no mention of sentiment analysis: maybe that was an oversight on my part, but I rather think that what we perceive as a commodity technology now was just not sufficiently mainstream back then.
Also if you compare with Jurafsky and Martin’s current take on the state of the art (see slide 39), you could argue that POS tagging, NER, IE and MT have all made significant progress too since then (which I would agree with). I am not sure I share their view that summarisation is in the ‘still really hard’ category; but like many things, it depends on how & where you set the quality bar. Anyway, I’ve appended the slides below. I’ll aim to post further materials as we work thru the course (watch this space
