Over the last several years, the field of natural language processing has been propelled forward by an explosion in the use of deep learning models. This article provides a brief introduction to the field and a quick overview of deep learning architectures and methods. It then sifts through the plethora of recent studies and summarizes a large assortment of relevant contributions. Analyzed research areas include several core linguistic processing issues in addition to many applications of computational linguistics. A discussion of the current state of the art is then provided along with recommendations for future research in the field.