Monographs aren't really a thing in NLP, beyond theses. There are a couple of reference books most people lean on, though:

* Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing by Manning and Schütze

* Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky and Martin (which is being revised for a third edition, which you can look at: https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/ )

Beyond that, you're basically stuck reading the research literature. On the up-side, most of that literature is freely available from the ACL anthology at http://aclweb.org/anthology/

Thank you very much. I'm aware of a large number of books that I could read, but if Sturgeon's law applies, or at least if a lot of the reading would be redundant anyway, I'll rather ask for pointers than to waste a lot of time by rediscovering the wheel. Basically, what I was asking for was the NLP's respected equivalent of Norvig and Russell, or similar books from other fields. Those two books seem to fit to bill.

If you have the time, I would start by taking Andrew Ng's machine learning class and then this NLP class when it is next offered in September 2016 https://www.coursera.org/learn/nlp

> Andrew Ng's machine learning class

Ah yes, the one I've heard about but still have to take. :) Well, I guess I should give Coursesa a chance. (Somehow I'm not fond of their "timelined" format, it seems redundant if you're communicating with a machine. I hope the future of online learning will avoid it like the plague.)