Machine learning is really the only way to deal with non-formal, unstructured data, there is nothing to believe, the technology has been battle tested by billions of people, just think of BERT used by Google Search or all the AI models used for moderation, translation or detection and many more cases. But I guess all these use cases are just too boring to talk about today, AI has already helped millions of people at least, including me since I'm a native English speaker, I learned a lot just by using Deepl or YouTube with the auto-generated captions (which are much better today than they were in the past).