[ScoutOrgo]

The OP most likely isn't up to date on latest NN architectures which can learn from the ordering of words. Statistical methods <> ML, not anymore in NLP.

[melenaboija]

I guess it depends on what you mean with statistical methods but as you said "not anymore in NLP" then yes, statistical methods are in NLP. Both language models and transformers use statistics to predict.

[lonelappde]

Statistical linguistics is older than modern neural nets. Google itself promoted its research into same.