As a linguist, I see what you mean. However, I disagree on a couple of things. First, I wouldn’t say “n-grams and understanding syntax trees and all the interco

As a linguist, I see what you mean. However, I disagree on a couple of things. First, I wouldn’t say “n-grams and understanding syntax trees and all the interconnections possible inside them” will make your NLP skills or results any better. Understanding n-grams and syntax trees should be quite easy for linguists, but that won’t do the trick. It turns out that tagging, lemmatizing, wsd, parsing, and many other fundamental tasks in NLP are not that “simple” after all. Of course, you can use libraries to do all of those tasks -and this is pretty simple, indeed,- but most libraries will end up making flagrant mistakes if texts -either spoken or written- get too complex. Second, real world texts are complex by default, so, for someone to “NLP the shit out of real world text/speech”, they will have to find creative solutions to make tools improve -and that can get pretty difficult. Once again, understanding n-grams and syntax trees is not enough. There’s one thing I totally agree with you on: tokenization, tagging, and the like might not be that impressive. Nonetheless, creative solutions to the problems underlying those tasks are, in fact, rare and impressive.