title: What are good starting points for someone interested in natural language processing?
body: <h1>Question</h1>
  
  <p>So I've recently came up with some new possible projects that would have to deal with deriving 'meaning' from text submitted and generated by users.</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Natural language processing</a> is the field that deals with these kinds of issues, and after some initial research I found the <a href="http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">OpenNLP Hub</a> and university collaborations like the <a href="http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">attempto project</a>. And stackoverflow has <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/88984/your-favorite-natural-language-parser">this</a>.</p>
  
  <p>If anyone could link me to some good resources, from reseach papers and introductionary texts to apis, I'd be happier than a 6 year-old kid opening his christmas presents!</p>
  
  <h1>Update</h1>
  
  <p>Through one of your recommendations I've found <a href="http://www.opencyc.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">opencyc</a> (<em>'the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine'</em>). Even more amazing still, there's a project that is a distilled version of opencyc called <a href="http://umbel.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">UMBEL</a>. It features semantic data in rdf/owl/skos n3 syntax.</p>
  
  <p>I've also stumbled upon <a href="http://antlr.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">antlr</a>, a parser generator for <em>'constructing recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions'</em>.</p>
  
  <p>And there's a question on here by me, that lists tons of <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/202092/where-can-i-find-free-and-open-data">free and open data</a>.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks stackoverflow community!</p>