I read grandparent's post as saying that despite all the research and untold amounts of compute power poured into NLP over the decades, its practitioners have y

I read grandparent's post as saying that despite all the research and untold amounts of compute power poured into NLP over the decades, its practitioners have yet to address the original real-world goals that led us to study it in the first place. Missing the forest for the trees, if you will. (I don't assert that it has hasn't. I know just enough about the topic to see how little I know. But it seems, from the outside, a valid criticism, and not one unique to the field.)