This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Natural Language Processing, JapTAL 2012, Kanazawa, Japan, in October 2012.The 27 revised full papers and 5 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on machine translation, multilingual issues, resouces, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, as well as speech and generation.