[distant_hat]

Yes. I worked with a company in India looking to mine biology papers with information on genes and automatically populate a database from that. Given the various ways in which people wrote (required to pass anti-plagiarism checks as well as different writing styles) it turned out that any kind of automated annotation was rife with errors. Given that it was supposed to be used for developing drugs they dropped it in favor of hiring Master students part time at $200/month and annotating manually.

[dlkf]

Great anecdote. I'm increasingly of the opinion that "pay some humans to do it" is the most underrated data product engineering pattern out there. It's well known that FAANG invest heavily in human annotators (it's not a coincidence that Mechanical Turk was developed at Amazon) and it's unclear why anyone else building data products shouldn't have to.