Hyphens are like parentheses, but only with one level. Which is okay in most situations because more levels would be more difficult to parse or pronounce.
But it is easier to understand if you change the sentence so that the parentheses become unnecessary.
“natural-language processing” = (natural language) processing = processing of natural languages
So it seems like we have a tradeoff between “speed of speech” and “simplicity of parsing”. If you talk about the same topic all the time, speed becomes more important than parsing, because everyone already knows what you mean. So you compress the words (get rid of a preposition or two) by using hyphens. Then a noob comes and complains.
Hyphens are like parentheses, but only with one level. Which is okay in most situations because more levels would be more difficult to parse or pronounce.
But it is easier to understand if you change the sentence so that the parentheses become unnecessary.
“natural-language processing” = (natural language) processing = processing of natural languages
So it seems like we have a tradeoff between “speed of speech” and “simplicity of parsing”. If you talk about the same topic all the time, speed becomes more important than parsing, because everyone already knows what you mean. So you compress the words (get rid of a preposition or two) by using hyphens. Then a noob comes and complains.