Here are links to influential academic papers in NLP. Learning the history is important to learn about what is going on outside of our code in the communities.
There is definitely a rich history going back all the way to even as far as 1960 - 1980's that has shaped this field into what it is.
It is also a very exciting time due to the success of machine learning off springing originally from the study of Artificial Intelligence coming to fruition as Moores has consistently tipped computation to critical mass. Natural Language Processing is also seeing similar parallels and so is a hot topic everywhere. Reading through these documents will help give you the bigger picture and where we currently stand.