Natural Language Processing (NLP) empowered mobile computing is the use of NLP techniques in the context of mobile environment. Research in this field has drawn much attention given the continually increasing number of publications in the last five years. This study presents the status and development trend of the research field through an objective, systematic, and comprehensive review of relevant publications available from Web of Science. Analysis techniques including a descriptive statistics method, a geographic visualization method, a social network analysis method, a latent dirichlet allocation method, and an affinity propagation clustering method are used. We quantitatively analyze the publications in terms of statistical characteristics, geographical distribution, cooperation relationship, and topic discovery and distribution. This systematic analysis of the field illustrates the publications evolution over time and identifies current research interests and potential directions for future research. Our work can potentially assist researchers in keeping abreast of the research status. It can also help monitoring new scientific and technological development in the research field.