Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.Extremism has grown as a global problem for society in recent years, especially after the apparition of movements such as
jihadism. This and other extremist groups have taken advantage of different approaches, such as the use of Social Media, to
spread their ideology, promote their acts and recruit followers. The extremist discourse, therefore, is reflected on the language
used by these groups. Natural language processing (NLP) provides a way of detecting this type of content, and several authors
make use of it to describe and discriminate the discourse held by these groups, with the final objective of detecting and
preventing its spread. Following this approach, this survey aims to review the contributions of NLP to the field of extremism
research, providing the reader with a comprehensive picture of the state of the art of this research area. The content includes
a first conceptualization of the term extremism, the elements that compose an extremist discourse and the differences with
other terms. After that, a review description and comparison of the frequently used NLP techniques is presented, including
how they were applied, the insights they provided, the most frequently used NLP software tools, descriptive and classification
applications, and the availability of datasets and data sources for research. Finally, research questions are approached
and answered with highlights from the review, while future trends, challenges and directions derived from these highlights
are suggested towards stimulating further research in this exciting research area.CRUE-CSIC agreementSpringer Natur
