I studied and researched NLP at the beginning of ML but before Deep Learning and it was pretty unimpressive as someone interested in Linguistics. Before I start

I studied and researched NLP at the beginning of ML but before Deep Learning and it was pretty unimpressive as someone interested in Linguistics. Before I started I had some high expectations about what computers could do with human languages (I did not yet have a background in CS). I remember Neural Networks presented as some interesting approach that could solve some problems, but nothing impressive. After graduating I did do some work on rule-based and ML translation engines, but I quickly got bored of it. I have been focused on application development since then. I didn't pay much attention to Deep Learning until 2022 came around and it surprised me. Now I am reviewing old notes and trying to catch up. 2023 is a very exciting year for computing and human language from an application side (I don't think LLMs give any insight into the way humans generate language).