Current approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) have shown impressive improvements in many important tasks: machine translation, language modeling, text generation, sentiment/emotion analysis, natural language understanding, and question answering, among others. The advent of new methods and techniques, such as graph-based approaches, reinforcement learning, or deep learning, have boosted many NLP tasks to a human-level performance (and even beyond). This has attracted the interest of many companies, so new products and solutions can benefit from advances in this relevant area within the artificial intelligence domain.This Special Issue reprint, focusing on emerging techniques and trendy applications of NLP methods, reports on some of these achievements, establishing a useful reference for industry and researchers on cutting-edge human language technologies.