Thank you, its good to hear some of what the state of the art is. My natural language processing studies at university are around the vintage you mention. I will have a go at this...

Yeah, NLP is a different beast from human language learning.

The most salient difference here is that NLP wants to automate as much as possible for reasons that are specific to NLP.

But for human language learning a lot of automation is actually harmful because manual effort tends to be good for Ebbinghaus’s arguably more important but less popularly appreciated discovery: memory encoding quality.