Natural Language Processing for programmers -- World Writable

I recently left my job to be an independent software engineer again. One of my objectives for my newly acquired free time was to increase my understanding of Natural Language Processing--the art and science of using computers to manipulate text--since human words are a thing I'm interested in. When I'm successful at learning a particular NLP technique, I'll release a project that uses it, probably in the form of a small Twitter bot or online toy. When I'm unsuccessful or hit a dead end, I'll write up a postmortem, which I hope will accomplish two goals: The cool kids are using deep learning/neural nets for NLP, as a lot of the traditional approaches seem to have reached their limit of effectiveness. But neural nets are their own thing with their own math, and while I'll get there eventually, I decided to start with pre-existing language models and statistical machine learning, both of which are better documented right now.