100 Must-Read NLP Papers

This is a list of 100 important natural language processing (NLP) papers that serious students and researchers working in the field should probably know about and read. This list is compiled by Masato Hagiwara. I welcome any feedback on this list.

This list is originally based on the answers for a Quora question I posted years ago: What are the most important research papers which all NLP students should definitely read?. I thank all the people who contributed to the original post.

This list is far from complete or objective, and is evolving, as important papers are being published year after year. Please let me know via pull requests and issues if anything is missing.

A paper doesn’t have to be a peer-reviewed conference/journal paper to appear here. We also include tutorial/survey-style papers and blog posts that are often easier to understand than the original papers.

Machine Learning

Neural Models

Clustering & Word/Sentence Embeddings

Topic Models

Language Modeling

Segmentation, Tagging, Parsing

Sequential Labeling & Information Extraction

Machine Translation & Transliteration, Sequence-to-Sequence Models

Coreference Resolution

Automatic Text Summarization

Question Answering and Machine Comprehension

Generation, Reinforcement Learning