This document describes the observations captured while supervising several students' theses, which were submitted at the German University of Bamberg. The research field Natural Language Processing and different use-cases therein were the focus of the theses, and several over-arching conclusions have been drawn, such as the influence of Large Language Models (LLM) on the research field.
Furthermore, as several of the theses have shown, the necessity of LLMs for the respective use-cases have been critically analyzed. Traditional and simpler models, such as support vector machines or rule-based information extraction systems were described in the paper as an alternative to LLMs.