spaCy and Explosion: past, present & future

1. spaCy and Explosion: past, present & future Matthew Honnibal
 Ines Montani Explosion
2. 1982 - 2014 Before spaCy
3. 1982 - 2014 Before spaCy Some time before 2005
4. 1982 - 2014 Before spaCy PhD 2005-2010 (Sydney) Some time before 2005
5. 1982 - 2014 Before spaCy PhD 2005-2010 (Sydney) ACL 2009 (Singapore) Some time before 2005
6. July 2014 First commit on spaCy
7. Early 2015 spaCy is first released
8. 2015 First collaborations • demos & visualizers like displaCy • first concepts of a modern approach to NLP annotation tools
9. 2015 First collaborations “Baskets” concept • demos & visualizers like displaCy • first concepts of a modern approach to NLP annotation tools
10. 2015 First collaborations “Baskets” concept Binary annotation tool concept • demos & visualizers like displaCy • first concepts of a modern approach to NLP annotation tools
11. Early 2016 First highlights: sense2vec
12. Early 2016 First highlights: German model • first non-English model • non-projective dependencies • developed by Wolfgang Seeker
13. Late 2016 Explosion • new company for AI developer tools • bootstrapped through consulting 
 for the first 6 months • funded through software sales 
 since 2017 • 100% independent and profitable
14. Late 2016 Explosion • new company for AI developer tools • bootstrapped through consulting 
 for the first 6 months • funded through software sales 
 since 2017 • 100% independent and profitable Our bets about NLP • NLP won’t just be a cloud API • number of developers will increase • annotation is better in-house
15. 2017 spaCy v2.0 • shift to deep learning • smaller and updatable models • custom pipeline components • custom extension attributes • built-in text classification • built-in displaCy visualizers • many other improvements Thinc, spaCy’s machine learning library
16. July 2017 neuralcoref by Hugging Face Community package for coreference
 resolution with spaCy
17. Late 2017 Prodigy • first commercial product • modern annotation tool • fully scriptable in Python
18. Late 2017 Prodigy • first commercial product • modern annotation tool • fully scriptable in Python
19. Late 2017 Prodigy • first commercial product • modern annotation tool • fully scriptable in Python users 2,000+ 250+ companies incl.
20. July 2018 10,000 stars on GitHub
21. , Early 2019 spaCy v2.1 • transfer learning and pretraining • 2-3 times faster tokenization • enhanced match pattern API • built-in rule-based NER • many other improvements
22. , Early 2019 spaCy v2.1 • transfer learning and pretraining • 2-3 times faster tokenization • enhanced match pattern API • built-in rule-based NER • many other improvements Transfer learning • better models with less data – huge win! • how to adapt for spaCy without bigger (and slower) models? • spacy pretrain is a pretty cool compromise
23. April 2019 Free interactive online course course.spacy.io
24. So what’s next 
 for spaCy?
25. July 2019 Explosion team Matthew Ines Montani Honnibal
26. July 2019 Explosion team Matthew Ines Montani Justin DuJardin Honnibal
27. July 2019 Explosion team Matthew Ines Montani Sebastián Ramírez Guadalupe Romero Giannis Daras Justin DuJardin Van Landeghem Sofie Honnibal
28. Today spaCy IRL • 2 sold-out corporate training days • 200+ conference attendees
29. What’s next? spaCy v3.0 • morphological features • entity linking • non-entity span tagging • static analysis of processing pipeline and its components
30. What’s next? spaCy v3.0 Vision for spaCy • focus on data structures and pipeline • build support for new tasks even if we don’t have a model • make sure it’s easy to BYO model • keep shipping good defaults • morphological features • entity linking • non-entity span tagging • static analysis of processing pipeline and its components
31. What’s next? spaCy v3.0 Vision for spaCy • focus on data structures and pipeline • build support for new tasks even if we don’t have a model • make sure it's easy to BYO model • keep shipping good defaults What’s out-of-scope? • anything generative: summarization, machine translation, etc. • multi-modal: audio, video, etc. • research assistance: plenty of good frameworks for developing novel techniques • morphological features • entity linking • non-entity span tagging • static analysis of processing pipeline and its components
32. , What’s next? spaCy ecosystem in your cloud • whole systems, not just libraries • programmable, extensible cluster • running under your control • automated setup, good defaults • full data privacy – we don’t want your data!
33. , What’s next? spaCy ecosystem in your cloud • whole systems, not just libraries • programmable, extensible cluster • running under your control • automated setup, good defaults • full data privacy – we don’t want your data! Processing with Dask
34. , What’s next? spaCy ecosystem in your cloud • whole systems, not just libraries • programmable, extensible cluster • running under your control • automated setup, good defaults • full data privacy – we don’t want your data! Prodigy Scale Processing with Dask
35. commits 10,000+ contributors 300+ 60+ extension packages 13,500+ GitHub stars 2,800+ closed issues 80+ releases
36. Thank you!