| I don’t know if anyone wants to dive into NLP as much as they just want to solve their problem at hand. You are right that lack of fundamental knowledge is problematic, especially that tools can allow you to make a greater quantity of solutions and therefore also a greater quantity of mistakes. However, at least the problem is still being solved. For example, a few months ago I wanted to organize my media collection by tagging files with artist names. I had a list of artist names but it wasn’t comprehensive so I wired together a bunch of python NLP libraries together to automatically pull out proper nouns from filenames, recognize English names, then annotate the files. I know almost nothing about parts of speech or anything else, so I made mistakes. About 10% of the results were errors in the first run, but after tuning it was down to about 1% which was good enough to run over the entire media library. If not for the tools, I would have never been able to finish that chore in a single day. To me, it was worth it despite my amateur mistakes. I view the library just like any other tool: a screw driver, a hammer, a wrench. I’m not a plumber or a carpenter, or an NLP researcher but I still want to use tools to fix my leaky faucets, remount my leaning cabinet doors, and organize my media collections as weekend projects. |