This paper presents an overview of the Natural Language Technology Project which is being carried out at the University of Nijmegen since the end of 1982. A sketch of the project's main goals is followed by a description of the state-of-the-art as of March 1984. The principles underlying the design of the various linguistic modules (morphological and syntactic parsers, morphological and syntactic generators, a large lexical database, an object-oriented knowledge representation system based on LISP) are explained. An integrated design is proposed for a natural language dialogue system sharing many components with an "author system", i.e., with a software tool capable of assisting authors in preparing and editing documents on the basis of built-in linguistic knowledge.