Explosion in 2019: Our Year in Review

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.

January

📻 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.

February

💻 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.

March

📻 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.

April

🏫 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

📻 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.

June

📻 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.

July

🎉 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).

August

💻 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.

September

🤝 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.

October

🤝 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.

November

📰 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.

December

📺 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!