With research in machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), we aim to give machines the ability to understand and use human language. In this talk, I give a high level introduction of some of the challenges of the field and give an overview of basic NLP tasks (and show some demos). I also introduce the Flair framework – developed by my group together with the open source community – that allows you to use state-of-the-art NLP methods in your research or applications. Time permitting, I’ll also briefly cover research aspects of the framework, such as learning word and sentence representations with neural language modeling, and discuss future directions.