Brilliant, Just Brilliant: Natural Language Processing Before and Beyond Large Language Models

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 58m

A fictional council's email triage system scores "Third week running my bin hasn't been collected. Brilliant. Just brilliant." as strongly positive, routes a polite note about a freezing flat to general enquiries, and makes nonsense of every email in Polish. Customer services lead Nadia Hussain and data scientist Tomasz Wójcik find a 2005-era bag of words under the hood. Part twelve of The Deep End's Machine Learning series goes from the 1954 promise of translation within five years to BERT's fill-in-the-blank game, by way of firing linguists, a spam filter you can run in your head, and king…