What is the state of the art in the field of NLP? I am new to Natural Language Processing, I think NLP is a challenging field, the syntax and semantic ambiguities could cause a lot of problems. For example I think for these problems machine translation is a hard task.

Therefore there are probably many approaches and methods that have been applied to this field. But what are the latest and most promising approaches and methods in the field of NLP?

Are these techniques highly dependent on the target language?
You are probably aware that deep learning is all the rage these days, and it has touched NLP too. There is a tutorial on it from a recent conference: Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing (without Magic) by Richard Socher and Christopher Manning, who are from Stanford.