In fact I would wish for more thematic articles from people like OP, who know the topic. It is easy to find some introductory course on NLP, but introductory is introductory, and as OP states there's a visible gap between what Google does in 2015, and what some GPL/MIT/BSD-licensed project does in 2015 in that area. While there's relatively large amount of material on DSP or CV, all these linguistics-related areas seem to have quite a barrier to entry even for those willing to learn.
I have a feeling that's because a great deal of NLP use is either proprietary or academic. It's either buried away in a combination of academic papers and academic heads or hidden away in a corporate codebase the world doesn't have access to.
The best way as far as I'm aware of to get into NLP is to take a course at a university. My university (University of Melbourne) was lucky to have an undergraduate subject taught by one of the lead authors of NLTK (Stephen Bird) and that was a great help. You can even take the subject on its own without enrolling in a full course.
