I'd endorse pretty much all of this. I want to make "domain adaptation as a service" the key part of spaCy's business model: you send us text, we send you a go

I'd endorse pretty much all of this. I want to make "domain adaptation as a service" the key part of spaCy's business model: you send us text, we send you a good model. Internally this will probably involve annotating part of the text, but that's a tactical decision we'll make. I hope we can make some break-throughs that help NER be much more general than it is currently. But the current solution you describe works fine; it's just a pain in the ass for each organization to take on. We want to have the required infrastructure and expertise set up, and make the process seamless.