Our Year in Review · Explosion

As 2019 draws to a close and we step into the 2020s, we thought we’d take a look
back at the year and all we’ve accomplished. And we realized we had so much that
we could give you a month-by-month rundown of everything that happened.

We’re also very happy to see our team grow this year, with four new
members working under the Explosion umbrella:
Sofie Van Landeghem, Adriane Boyd, Walter Henry
and Sebastián Ramírez.

• 📻 Jan 15: The year started out with us as guests on the
  NLP Highlights podcast,
  hosted by Matt Gardner and Waleed Ammar of Allen AI. In the interview, Matt
  and Ines talked about Prodigy, where training corpora come
  from and the challenges of annotating data for an NLP system – with some ideas
  about how to make it easier.
• 📺 Jan 16: Ines followed that up with an appearance on
  German documentary “Frag deinen Kühlschrank”
  (literally “ask your refrigerator”) for Bayerischer Rundfunk on German TV
  about AI technologies. It also included a small glimpse of spaCy, Prodigy and
  our day-to-day work on GitHub.
• 🎤 Jan 28: Ines then joined the great lineup of
  Applied Machine Learning Days in Lausanne,
  Switzerland. Ines’ talk in the language track,
  “Practical Transfer Learning for NLP with spaCy and Prodigy”,
  focused on the increasing trend of initializing models with information from
  large raw-text corpora, and how you can use this type of technique in spaCy
  and Prodigy.

• 💻 Feb 1: February kicked off with this neat little thing we built: a
  wrapper for the new Stanford NLP library!
  Now their state-of-the-art Universal Dependencies models can be directly used
  in your spaCy pipeline.
• 💻 Feb 1: That same day, we merged
  this awesome PR by
  Sofie Van Landeghem, increasing tokenization
  speed by 2-3 times across languages at the same accuracy by refactoring the
  regular expression and replacing regex with re. This is a bit of a double
  landmark as it marks the beginning of our amazing working relationship with
  Sofie, who has since joined the spaCy core team full time.
• 📺 Feb 6: This month we also released a little
  FAQ video, which was really fun
  to make. In it, Ines gives tips and tricks for NLP annotation and training
  based on common advice we’ve been giving to Prodigy and spaCy users. Got a
  question? Check out the video and see if we’ve already got your answer.
• ✨ Feb 18: Finally in February, Prodigy v1.7.0 was
  released – our first major upgrade to Prodigy for 2019. This update made it
  easy to set up named multi-user sessions in a single instance and use some of
  the multi-user features we’ve developed for the upcoming Prodigy Teams. It
  also introduced a new setting for instant submissions and support for custom
  CSS and JavaScript across all interfaces.

• 📻 Mar 9: Ever been curious about how Explosion makes its money? Rather
  than talk programming, Ines started off March by sitting down and discussing
  building a software business on
  Michael Kennedy’s TalkPython podcast.
  This was a fun way for us to tell another side of the Explosion story.
• 💻 Mar 18: March also saw spaCy v2.1 released – the
  first big spaCy update of the year! The update fixed outstanding bugs on the
  tracker, gave the docs a huge makeover, improved both speed and accuracy, made
  installation significantly easier and faster, and added some exciting new
  features, like ULMFit/BERT/ELMo-style language model pretraining.
• ✨ Mar 20: A few days later, we upgraded Prodigy to
  v1.8 to support spaCy v2.1. There was also now support for pretraining, new
  recipes for reviewing annotations and resolving conflicts, multiple-choice
  text classification, easy dataset merging and more.
• 🎤 Mar 25: Towards the end of the month, Ines had the honor to be a guest
  at WiDS (Women in Data Science) Poznań, where
  she talked practical transfer learning for NLP.

• 🏫 Apr 17: In April, we released our popular free
  Advanced NLP with spaCy course. Ines built the
  interactive app to be used by anyone wanting to learn spaCy… and people had
  a lot of fun with it – including Explosion’s “non-tech” hire, Walter.

• 📻 May 7: In May, Ines got the chance to sit down with Sam Charrington for
  the
  TWiML Podcast.
  They got to talking about spaCy, spaCy’s focus on industrial use cases and
  open source in general.

• 💻 May 12: May also featured another jump up for spaCy when we released
  v.2.1.4. which included improved training commands alongside the usual bug
  fixes.

• 📻 Jun 3: While we were busy preparing some things for early July, we did
  take time with Kunal Jain on
  Data Hack Radio by Analytics Vidhya
  to talk the early days of spaCy, what’s guided the library’s development and
  how machine learning is kind of like web development.
• 🤝 Jun 24: Sofie Van Landeghem joined the Explosion team! Sofie
  has been involved with machine learning and NLP as an engineer for 12 years.
  This year her work collided with Explosion (or more specifically spaCy) and we
  started working together in February. She is currently one of the core
  developers of spaCy. Sofie’s main project has been spaCy’s
  new entity linker component.
  More recently, she’s also been working on the
  Hugging Face Neuralcoref
  component, which we hope to have merged into the core library early next year.

• 🎉 Jul 4-6: And then there was: spaCy IRL,
  our first big conference, which took place in Berlin at the historic
  Heimathafen Neukölln. We had already decided at the end of 2018 that we wanted
  to do this and after seven months of planning and hard work, we couldn’t have
  been happier with the result. The main event was sold out with 200 attendees
  and we had 13 speakers including
  Yoav Goldberg and
  Sebastian Ruder as keynotes.
  This was accompanied by trainings attended by 70 people – a second was added
  to the original because of the demand.
• 📻 Jul 18: After a brief rest following spaCy IRL, Ines took a minute to
  appear on the
  Python Bytes
  podcast with Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken. Among other things, Ines
  discussed fast.ai’s new course on Natural Language
  Processing and using Polyaxon for model training and
  experiment management.
• 📰 Jul 29: Then it was really nice to see Ines featured as the
  PyDev of the Week on the Mouse vs. Python blog
  at the end of the month. Check out the interview and see what Ines had to say
  about her early days with programming, how she got into Python and some
  current projects (at the time).

• 💻 Aug 2: August started off with an exciting release as we introduced
  spacy-transformers. With this new library, you
  can now use huge transformer models like BERT, GPT-2 and XLNet in spaCy, via a
  new interface library we developed that connects spaCy to
  Hugging Face’s awesome implementations.
• 📺 Aug 21: Our official spaCy learning materials canon grew at the end of
  August to include a new video series:
  “Intro to NLP with spaCy” hosted by Vincent Warmerdam.
  We first met Vincent in person at a conference, and his funny, outgoing
  personality was a perfect fit for a video series.
• 📰 Aug 29: Ahead of her appearance at the Zündfunk Netzkongress in Munich
  in November, Ines appeared in an
  article on BR.de
  (German) discussing the pitfalls of placing too much hope in artificial
  intelligence.

• 🤝 Sep 2: Walter Henry joined the Explosion team. Walter has
  been a writer and journalist living in Berlin for the past 10 years mostly
  working in cultural journalism. Through his longstanding working relationship
  with Ines, he began to freelance for Explosion in small capacities in 2018.
  This past summer he came on board to help with the event management for our
  very successful spaCy IRL. In September he
  officially came on as Explosion’s first non-tech hire and assists the team in
  a variety of ways.
• 💻 Sep 4:
  spacy-transformers kept
  getting better as we released v0.4.0, which added support for Hugging Face’s
  DistilBERT, a pre-packaged DistilBERT model and more.
• 🤝 Sep 15: Adriane Boyd makes up the second spaCy developer team
  hire in 2019. Adriane is a computational linguist who has been engaged in
  research since 2005, completing her PhD in 2012. She started participating in
  the spaCy community in Spring this year, and we met up with her at the spaCy
  IRL conference. After a few freelance projects, we were thrilled to have
  Adriane join the team full-time. Adriane started out working on our internal
  systems for datasets and evaluation, and has gone on to make tons of
  improvements across the library.
• 💘 Sep 19: As a thank you to our community, we started sending out another
  round of stickers
  (the first was in 2017) – this time going out to over 1100 people by the end
  of the year.
• 📺 Sep 24: Data science instructor Vincent returned for
  “Intro to NLP with spaCy #2”.
  In this episode he built a rule-based matcher to bootstrap an NER pipeline.

• 🤝 Oct 1: Sebastián Ramírez joined the Explosion team! Many of
  you might recognize Sebastián’s name as the author of
  FastAPI, the new Python library for
  modern REST APIs that’s quickly becoming the industry standard and is known
  for its incredible technical documentation. When we finally met Sebastián we
  knew it was a perfect match and he moved from Colombia to Berlin to join the
  team here. He’s working on the upcoming Prodigy Teams and a lot of other cool
  stuff.
• 💻 Oct 2: spaCy got a big upgrade in October with the
  release of v2.2! Among the new features are core models
  for Norwegian and Lithuanian, Dutch NER with more labels, it’s 5-10 times
  smaller on disk and 10 times faster in phrase matching, it efficiently
  serializes collections of Doc objects and there’s CLI for textcat training and
  data debugging.
• 🏆 Oct 10: This month we were also proud to
  accept the META Seal of Recognition
  at META-FORUM 2019 in
  Brussels, along with Mozilla. The META-FORUM is an international conference
  series backed by the European Union on powerful and innovative Language
  Technologies for a multilingual information society.
• 🎤 Oct 12-15: Following that right up, Ines and Matt were delighted to
  take part in PyCon India in Chennai. Matt
  talked about how to use huge
  transformer models such BERT in spaCy through spacy-transformers. Ines was
  proud to present the
  keynote,
  playfully titled “Let Them Write Code” – you can
  watch whole talk here.
• 💻 Oct 31: spaCy gets one last update before the month is out in v2.2.2.
  The new features
  this time around include multiprocessing in nlp.pipe, a simpler GPU install
  and setup, base support for Luxembourgish and model fixes, as well as
  forwards-compatible support for future APIs.

• 📰 Nov 1: In November, Ines sat down with German magazine
  Kulturnews for an interview.
• 🎤 Nov 8: Coinciding with her trip to Munich to speak at Zündfunk, Ines
  took time out to speak at the
  Hacking Machine Learning Meetup
  about spacy-transformers.
• 🎤 Nov 9: The main reason for the trip to Munich though was the fun and
  thoroughly informative
  Zündfunk Netzkongress at the Münchner
  Volkstheater. Ines’ talk
  “Künstliche Intelligenz: Beyond the Hype”
  (German) touched on the dangers of unconditional belief in technology, as well
  as romanticizing the past.
• 📺 Nov 9: Ines also did a fun little interview for German TV channel
  Bayerische Rundfunk about her talk at Zündfunk. You can
  watch it here
  (in German).
• 💻 Nov 22: This milestone was also one of the most fun:
  sense2vec reloaded! We updated the library, models
  and demo to compare 2015 and 2019 using contextually-keyed word vectors
  trained on billions of words from Reddit comments. Basically, it’s an
  at-a-glance look at how (quickly) language has changed over the past four
  years. Even your non-NLP friends can have fun with this. Go ahead,
  try it out and enter “Billy Ray Cyrus”, “AOC” or whatever
  you’d like.
• 💻 Nov 22: Towards the end of the month we started
  open-sourcing some of our datasets and NLP example projects.
  The projects include 1000 annotated examples each, training/evaluation
  scripts, results, data visualizers and some powerful tok2vec weights trained
  on Reddit to initialize models.
• 📰 Nov 28: Ending November,
  Ines was featured on SourceSort,
  a platform interviewing open source developers, about complementing the 15k+
  star open-source project spaCy with
  commercial developer tools, namely Prodigy. There’s also a
  bit of spaCy history in there as well.

• 📺 Dec 7: Vincent returned again in early December for
  “Intro to NLP with spaCy #3”.
  In this episode he explained how to transition a rule-based prototype towards
  an NER model to achieve faster results and a baseline for machine learning
  experiments.

• 🖊 Dec 9: Ines’
  key thoughts on trends in AI from 2019 and looking into 2020.
  If you want to read a few key thoughts on trends in AI from 2019 and a
  lookahead into 2020, take a look… Ines summed it up here in a short and
  informative post.

• 📻 Dec 9: In a final podcast appearance for the year, Matt and Ines spoke
  to Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson on
  Practical AI to talk spaCy, its
  history and of course some thoughts on the latest trends in NLP.

• ✨ Dec 18: And last but not least, we end the year with our biggest
  release so far: Prodigy v1.9. This release includes a new
  site and tons of new docs, new training and data conversion
  recipes, a
  “blocks” UI for combining interfaces,
  a UI for
  free-form text input and
  lots, lots more!

With the community and the team continuing to grow, we look forward to making 2020 even better. Thanks for all your support!