<i>It&#x27;s easier to tout &quot;simplicity and leanness&quot; when you don&#x27;t have to carry over all the baggage and backward compatibility accumulated over the years.</i><p>Well, why do we have to build large, clunky (NLP) libraries to start with? Build lean and mean components as UNIX programs or easily bindable libraries and use a reasonable input&#x2F;output format. E.g. nearly every statistical dependency parser uses CoNLL-X for input&#x2F;output. You&#x27;ll have no trouble swapping out MaltParser, Turbo Parser, or my neural net dependency parser. They all use the same, boring, tabular format.<p>Sure, this could be more work for a beginner. So, a project could make a curated list &#x2F; meta-package of components that are robust, state-of-the-art and work together.