The Bigram Patch

NLP Engineer interview at Cohere, and the interviewer asks:

“Your cheap bag-of-words filter handles most traffic because the LLM costs far more per call. Support shows you it flags ‘not bad at all’ as negative. A teammate proposes adding bigrams. Why is that only a partial fix?”

Don’t say: “Add bigrams. Then ‘not bad’ is one feature and the negation is handled.”