This document provides an overview of statistical natural language processing (NLP). It begins with introducing the speaker, Mona Diab, and their research interests in NLP. It then discusses the growing amount of digital data being produced and the potential for machines to process and understand human language. However, language is complex with ambiguity, and good NLP solutions require both linguistic and machine learning knowledge. The document outlines some of the goals and challenges of NLP, including resolving ambiguity, and provides examples of NLP applications and techniques like probabilistic models built from language data.