It was founded in 1983, and its purpose is to promote and divulge every kind of activity related to teaching, research and development in the natural language processing field, on both a national and international level.

Among the main activities of the SEPLN are the organization of an annual congress, which is attended by the research groups working in the natural language processing field, especially for Spanish, Catalan, Basque or Galician languages; the edition of the academic journal Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural supported by a committee who guarantee some established criteria of quality and periodicity; a web server with information about issues related to natural language processing and an email service which inform about the current issues and is used as an open forum.

[4] This community is a reference in Latin America and worldwide, especially because it has created models for the successful processing of Spanish and three minority languages.

The coordinated development of technology for Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician by this community has benefited the four languages as a whole.

This is the timeline of cities with a NLP group that organized SEPLN conferences:[16][17][18] The presidents who have governed this society since its creation have been the following: