This study covers recent developments in automatic text processing, including syntactic, semantic, and statistical language analysis methods. The emphasis is on applications in the areas of machine translation, information retrieval, and question answering. Recent on-line text processing methods, using man-machine interaction are covered in some detail, as are certain simple, syntactic analysis methods incorporated into a number of experimental information retrieval systems. An evaluation is made of the syntactic analysis methods, and their importance in a retrieval environmentt is discussed.