This special number contains 10 research papers of special merit written by students of the 5th intake (2012) of the Erasmus Mundus International Masters in Natural Language Processing and Human Language Technology as a requirement of their research projects which they presented at the 5^th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Human Language Technology, Universidade do Algarve, June 19-20, 2014. Themes: spoken language (2 papers), word segmentation (1 paper), named entities (2 papers), machine translation (3 papers), metaphorical language (1 paper) and language resources (1 paper). Languages studied: English, French, Khmer, Montenegrin, Serbian, Ukrainian and Urdu.