I'm no expert, but it sounds like you want to learn to run a marathon before you can crawl. However that said if you have a passion for something pursue it with gusto: Read every book, article and blog that you can find on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning and find someone who is a true master. Then ask that person how to get started.

I did a quick casual search and found this: https://www.coursera.org/course/nlp

I would try to contact Dan and see what he thinks: http://www.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/

What's the worst that can happen? Reach out...