The late Fred Jelinek, founder and manager of IBM's speech recognition R&D team at TJ Watson Research Center @ Yorktown Heights created the famous joke "every t

The late Fred Jelinek, founder and manager of IBM's speech recognition R&D team at TJ Watson Research Center @ Yorktown Heights created the famous joke "every time I fire a linguist, recognition accuracy goes up" - as someone with a stake in both ML and NLP I would say more credit goes to ML than to NLP for sure. Will linguistic knowledge not be needed at all? I don't want to speculate about the far-out future, but what I can safely say from industry experience that at any stage (1996 - now) there was always some extra gain to be had on top of the ((statistical | neural) - only) approach of the day by engineering hybrid solutions that at some level also exploit human-injected linguistic knowledge and human-injected business rules. Next month at ECIR 2023 in Dublin, I will present a "shoot out" between a BERT model especially pre-trained (for months) and fine-tuned for document summarization of financial meetings (earnings calls) and a one-line POSIX shell script (two cascaded grep commands) written in 3 minutes by yours truly that also extrcts a summary - with surprising results...