A primary ingestion pipeline configured for use in natural language processing includes annotators configured for annotating documents. The annotators and documents to be annotated are evaluated. Based on the evaluations, an ingestion risk score is generated for each document. Each ingestion risk score represents a likelihood that an associated document will not successfully be annotated by the annotators. Each ingestion risk score is compared to a set of risk criteria. Based on the comparisons, a determination is made that each document of a first set of documents satisfies the set of risk criteria. A further determination is made, based on the comparisons, that each document of a second set of documents does not satisfy the set of risk criteria. In response to these determinations, the first set of documents is entered into the primary ingestion pipeline and the second set of documents is provided special handling.