Yes, NLP, and sometimes structured data released by special services that receive the news alerts early, process them into a structured form, and then make them available at the same moment that the normal services do.

Yep, NLP. As a grad student in comp linguistics, I was surprised to find out that financial news was an enourmous application space for NLP, for exactly this sort of reason. Including the automation of content creation. Much financial news isn't written by a human, and hasn't been for a long while. It's too slow. Faster content creation equals faster actionable data equals huge advantage.

NLP is a possibility, but bear in mind that HFT is all about optimization. The confidence levels desired can vary significantly based on what you intend to do with the information.

Acting on M&A news by taking a more aggressive position generally requires more confidence than, say, backing off based on ‘bad’ news. In the first case, you want to be pretty sure of the headline before taking action. In the latter, the mere presence of words like ‘fraud’ and ‘investigation’ might be enough to play it safe and say, “we’re going to back off trading this underlying until a human has a chance to look at this.”