自然語言工程滿足了自動語言處理各個領域的專業人員和研究人員的需求，無論是從理論還是語料庫語言學、翻譯、詞典編纂、計算機科學還是工程學的角度。它的目的是彌合傳統計算語言學研究與實際應用之間的差距，并具有潛在的現實應用價值。除了出版關于廣泛主題的原創研究文章——從文本分析、機器翻譯、信息檢索、語音處理和生成到集成系統和多模態接口——它還出版關于特定自然語言處理方法、任務或應用程序的特刊。該雜志歡迎對某一特定主題的最新研究報告。自然語言工程還出版流行的行業觀察和新興趨勢專欄以及書評。

Natural Language Engineering meets the needs of professionals and researchers working in all areas of automatic language processing, whether from the perspective of theoretical or corpus linguistics, translation, lexicography, computer science or engineering. Its aim is to bridge the gap between traditional computational linguistics research and the implementation of practical applications with potential real-world use. As well as publishing original research articles on a broad range of topics - from text analysis, machine translation, information retrieval, speech processing and generation to integrated systems and multi-modal interfaces - it also publishes special issues on specific natural language processing methods, tasks or applications. The journal welcomes survey papers describing the state of the art on a specific topic. Natural Language Engineering also publishes the popular Industry Watch and Emerging Trends columns as well as book reviews.