There are obvious areas in which natural language processing is set to move forward in 2014 specially:

• improvements in statistically-based machine translation (the Google team, Microsoft, but also a couple of others specially in the Asian market),
• innovative ways of NLP-support for vertical semantic search,
• a myriad of NLP-supported solutions for analysis of social networks,
• As usual in the last few years, quite a few teams will try to work further on cross-lingual, “semantic”-aided search. I don’t believe there will be a major breakthrough there unless there is a fundamental focus shift: researchers need to tackle some fundamental topics about adaptability and scalability. Some more innovative approaches to linguistic, semantic representation and their link to statistics

I think there are some areas that have been overlooked, a couple of approaches that need more attention. I will be posting about them in the next weeks.