Introduction and Overview, Language Modeling, History and Applications, Basic Text Processing - Word stemming, tokenization, normalization, Part of Speech tagging, Text Classification – basics and process, tools, Information Retrieval, TF/IDF, Ranked IR, Vector Space Models, Query analysis and processing, Basics of Information Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, Maximum Entropy models, Relation Extraction; Introduction to Semantics, word sense and word similarity, Basics of Wordnets, tools, Emerging trends, research issues, challenges, interesting applications in various domains.