Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been an area of high interest in research and many practical tasks for several decades. Based on the analysis of the documents contained in the Scopus database, an overview of publications is presented from the history of early works and current problems to hypotheses for future research directions in the scientific field of NLP. The main stages of the formation and scientific events are presented through the prism of the evolution of the main methods, tasks and approaches in the light of the research works of scientists who have made a significant contribution to the development of the area under consideration. The authors believe that this material will be useful for scientific teams and individual researchers, who want to keep abreast of the technologies and applications of NLP of the past, present and future.