AI, NLP: Way Deeper Than Microsoft's Marketing

Welcome to the natural language processing (NLP) edition of my "under-the-hood" series on AI (artificial intelligence) technology. Most major tech companies are announcing initiatives, introducing products (e.g., Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) with its Echo device and platform) or experiments in public (e.g., Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Tay debacle). On Seeking Alpha (and I am sure in many other places as well), the topic of natural language processing seems to be confusing many people because they are not clear on what new technologies here can do and what they should expect from them in the immediate future. Even though I have touched on the subject before - e.g. on my explanation of IBM's (NYSE:IBM) Watson - I feel like I have not explained the specific topic of natural language processing comprehensively. There is a specific reason why the topic is getting so much attention and it has to do with the convergence of various subfields of computer science and statistics.