This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8 th  Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language, AINL 2019, held in Tartu, Estonia, in November 2019.  The 10 revised full papers and 2 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topics: data acquisition and annotation; human-computer interaction; statistical natural language processing; neural language models.