July 5-6, 2019


Berlin, Germany

Keynote

Yoav Goldberg

Allen AI
Keynote

Sebastian Ruder

DeepMind

Matthew Honnibal

Explosion

Ines Montani

Explosion

Mark Neumann

Allen AI

McKenzie Marshall

Barings

Sofie Van Landeghem

Explosion

Giannis Daras

Explosion

Guadalupe Romero

Explosion

Patrick Harrison

S&P Global

Justina Petraityte

Rasa

Peter Baumgartner

RTI International

David Dodson

Quartz

Photos

Thank you for making spaCy IRL such an amazing conference. We still can't believe everything went so well. The positive vibe in the room was incredible! Here are some visual impressions captured by our event photographer. If you're in one of the photos, feel free to download and use it for your social media profiles or elsewhere. You do not have to credit our photographer, but he'd appreciate it. All photos by Ema Discordant.

Videos

You can check out the full YouTube playlist here.

Conference

We're pleased to invite the spaCy community and other folks working on Natural Language Processing to Berlin this summer for a small and intimate event July 6, 2019. We've booked a beautiful venue in one of Berlin's coolest neighborhoods, hand-picked an awesome lineup of speakers and scheduled plenty of social time to get to know each other and exchange ideas.

The conference will take place at Heimathafen Neukölln, with one track of talks. Tickets include entry, coffee, tea and soft drinks, and snacks throughout the day. We're looking forward to seeing you there!

Coming to Berlin for spaCy IRL and want to make the most of the city? Check out our Berlin Guide.

Schedule

09:00
Check in & Registration
10:00
Opening
Matthew Honnibal & Ines Montani · Explosion
10:15
KeynoteTransfer Learning in Open-Source Natural Language Processing
Sebastian Ruder · DeepMind
10:50
"So when will spaCy support BERT?" Improving sparse transformer models for efficient self-attention
Giannis Daras · Explosion
11:15
Applied NLP: Lessons from the Field
Peter Baumgartner · RTI International
11:40
Lessons learned in helping developers ship conversational AI assistants to production
Justina Petraitytė · Rasa
12:00
Social time
13:00
KeynoteThe missing elements in NLP
Yoav Goldberg · Allen AI
13:35
Entity linking functionality in spaCy: grounding textual mentions to knowledge base concepts
Sofie Van Landeghem · Explosion
14:00
Rethinking rule-based lemmatization
Guadalupe Romero · Explosion
14:20
ScispaCy: A full spaCy pipeline and models for scientific and biomedical text
Mark Neumann · Allen AI
14:40
Social time
15:30
Financial NLP at S&P Global
Patrick Harrison · S&P Global
15:55
NLP in Asset Management
McKenzie Marshall · Barings
16:20
spaCy in the News: Quartz's NLP pipeline
David Dodson · Quartz
16:40
Social time
17:00
Closing: spaCy and Explosion, present and future
Matthew Honnibal & Ines Montani · Explosion
18:00
End

Corporate Training

On July 4 and 5, 2019, the days before the conference, we'll also be holding a training day for teams using spaCy in production. Over the course of the day, you'll learn more about constructing custom end-to-end pipelines, training more accurate models for specific domains, and scaling spaCy for large text analytics workloads.

The training day will consist of 7 hours of hands-on instruction from Matthew Honnibal and Ines Montani, spaCy's core developers.

The day will be aimed towards people already familiar with the library. This isn't an introductory session where we rehash content you can find in the docs. We want to do a deeper dive with a small number of people, to help you build more effective NLP solutions. To keep things running smoothly and give us enough hands-on time with all participants, the training day will be strictly limited in size. So if you're interested, be sure to book quickly!

Location

The training will take place at Mitosis Factory, Sonnenallee 67, 12045 Berlin. (Note: They also have another location a few blocks away, so make sure to double-check the address.) Drinks and lunch will be provided on site.

What to bring

Laptop with working wifi card, Python environment with spaCy installed and the models you want to work with downloaded, A/C adapter suitable for European power sockets (the one with two circular prongs).

We will provide datasets for different domains and other resources to work with, plus access to Prodigy for a little on-site annotation.

Schedule

09:00
Check in & Registration
09:30
Session 1
13:00
Lunch break
14:00
Session 2
17:30
End
19:30
Dinner at a local restaurant


Dinner on July 4: BRLO Brwhouse · Schöneberger Straße 16 · 10963 Berlin
Dinner on July 5: Shishi · Ritterstraße 12-14 · 10969 Berlin

Tickets

Tickets are available on Eventbrite. A limited number of Early Bird tickets are available at a discount, as early confirmations will really help us finish organizing the event. In order to attend the event, you must read and agree to the terms of the Code of Conduct.

Due to popular demand, we've added a second day of training on Thursday, July 4. The trainings will be very small (30-40 people), so be sure to book quickly.

Contact us

We're really looking forward to putting this on, so we hope we can see you there. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch. You can email us at contact@explosion.ai, or drop us a quick line on Twitter.