I think NLP is really cool, but it seems to be moving so quickly. If I wanted to get a decent overview, are there some review papers or textbooks with good coverage that aren't too out of date?
Just learn Deep Learning instead. I'm a NLP person, and I think the Wit.ai people said it best: Many papers were kind of “the state of the art for X was Y. We replaced the hand-crafted, manually hacked, heavily engineered Z by a RNN. It improved state of the art by 5 points.” The poor guys who presented deep learning-free papers invariably got the question: “did you also try with a [insert deep net technique here]?”…
Wouldn't this require larger datasets? That isn't always an option. I'm imagining that a smaller, more computationally efficient network could learn nearly as well with fewer data points given these heavily engineered features. Is that off base?