Book excerpt: Accompanying continued industrial production and sales of artificial intelligence and expert systems is the risk that difficult and resistant theoretical problems and issues will be ignored. The participants at the Third Tinlap Workshop, whose contributions are contained in Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, remove that risk. They discuss and promote theoretical research on natural language processing, examinations of solutions to current problems, development of new theories, and representations of published literature on the subject. Discussions among these theoreticians in artificial intelligence, logic, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics draw a comprehensive, up-to-date picture of the natural language processing field.