Evaluating Classical NLP vs LLM Approaches

The reflexive answer is “use a model” and the contrarian answer is “classical methods are underrated”. Both are slogans. The decision is a calculation with four inputs, and once you write it down it usually answers itself. The four variables Volume. Documents per month. This decides whether per-document cost is a rounding error or the entire budget, and it is the only variable that changes the answer by orders of magnitude. Output space. Closed (one of eight buckets, a span, a ranked list) or…