Darpa working on its own deep-learning project for NLP

This article is basically nonsense. The "Deep" here doesn't mean "deep learning"/neural networks. They just mean non-superficial understanding of text (beyond keywords, named entity recognition, and the like.)

For example, the Illinois NLP group has a grant under this project, and their pubs are largely not using "deep learning." http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/page/funding_view/43