front matter
Computers have been trying hard to make sense of language in recent decades. Supported by disciplines like linguistics, computer science, statistics, and machine learning, the field of computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP) has come into full bloom, supported by numerous scientific journals, conferences, and active industry participation. Big tech companies like Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft appear to have prioritized their efforts in natural language analysis and understanding, and progressively offer datasets and helpful open source software for the natural language processing community. Currently, deep learning is increasingly dominating the NLP field.