Thanks for the comprehensive answer, I really appreciate it! Also, I like the approach overall, it's fresh & interesting! :). It's just like this discussion of "feasibility vs. scientifically 'sound'". By all means, I am all in for anything that solves the 'real' problem at hand best. However, scientific communities are a tad more conservative, everything has to be crystal clear and reproducible (also here, by all means, I don't judge that, it's just like that we've to be clear whether the goal is to produce 'most accurate predictions' vs. 'looking under the hood of predictions'. In any case, I am diverging a bit here ... what I mean is that if you say that

Regarding parsing: Natural language parsers are already astonishingly good. Every sentence I have tried entering in this interactive online parser[1] , for instance, has been parsed correctly.

you are trusting the system, and it may work all the time you tried it out, but there's no "guarantee"? I think in industrial applications, this may be good enough, in academic research, I am not sure. I still like the idea though :)