Explosion · Developer tools and consulting for AI, Machine Learning and NLP

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Explosion · Developer tools and consulting for AI, Machine Learning and NLP

Explosion builds developer tools for AI, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. →
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Beta test our new product for agentic NLP development

Beta test our new product for agentic NLP development

We’re looking for beta partners for Ellf: a platform and virtual assistant that makes your coding agent like Claude Code proficient at developing NLP solutions. Contact us or sign up for the waitlist if your team needs help with a project focused on tasks like information extraction!

Taking back control of your AI development

Taking back control of your AI development Feminist AI (PyData London)

Short unconference presentation by Ines on the current focus of our work: empowering developers to build AI in-house again.

The ultimate guide to optimizing annotation workflows

The ultimate guide to optimizing annotation workflows

This blog post collects tips and advice for how to build efficient human-in-the-loop data development workflows, break down business problems into actionable annotation steps and make the most of automation and model assistance.

Building AI with AI

Building AI with AI PyCon Ireland Keynote

AI-powered coding assistants have transformed the way we build software, and AI itself. In this talk, Ines shows why we should use LLMs to build systems instead of as systems, and why code is more important than ever, not less.

Applied NLP in the Age of Generative AI: Future-Proof Strategies for Banking and Finance

Applied NLP in the Age of Generative AI: Future-Proof Strategies for Banking and Finance ECONDAT Keynote

A modern approach and mindset for building future-proof NLP pipelines in-house, focusing on use cases from banking, finance and economics.

Feminist AI LAN Party

Feminist AI LAN Party PyCon DE & PyData

Three days of workshops, hacking, creating, publishing and connecting locally, featuring a data development workshop with Prodigy and a session on hacking LLMs.

KI zwischen Freiheit und Kontrolle: The AI Revolution Will Not Be Monopolized

KI zwischen Freiheit und Kontrolle: The AI Revolution Will Not Be Monopolized data:unplugged (German)

How should we envision the use of AI in practice? And are we heading further into a black box era with larger and larger models, obscured behind APIs controlled by big tech monopolies?

Mastering spaCy

Mastering spaCy Déborah Mesquita, Duygu Altinok (Packt Publishing, 2025)

Build structured NLP solutions with custom components and models powered by LLMs. By end of the book you will be empowered to build robust NLP pipelines and integrate them with web applications to build end-to-end solutions.

Using natural language processing to identify emergency department patients with incidental lung nodules requiring follow-up

Using natural language processing to identify emergency department patients with incidental lung nodules requiring follow-up Moore, Socrates, Hesami, Denkewicz, Cavallo, Venkatesh, Taylor (2025)

CT reports were annotated by MD raters using Prodigy software to develop a stepwise NLP “pipeline” that first excluded prior or known malignancy, determined the presence of a lung nodule, and then categorized any recommended follow-up. NLP was developed using a RoBERTa large language model on the spaCy platform.

spaCy Natural Language Processing: From Beginner to Advanced

spaCy Natural Language Processing: From Beginner to Advanced Guan Wang, Xiaoquan Kong (2024)

The first Chinese-language book on spaCy for beginners and experienced practitioners, covering traditional NLP techniques and how to leverage LLMs for various NLP tasks.

📚 spacy-layout v0.0.6Nov 24, 2024

Add support for tables and convert tabular data to pandas.DataFrame

📚 spacy-layout v0.0.1Nov 18, 2024

Process PDFs, Word documents and more with spaCy

uOttawa at LegalLens-2024: Transformer-based Classification Experiments

uOttawa at LegalLens-2024: Transformer-based Classification Experiments Meghdadi, Inkpen (2024)

Our training utilizes the spaCy pipeline configured with a transformer model and a transition-based parser for NER tasks. The deberta-v3-base model has been selected for the main transformer architecture.

Reality is not an End-to-End Prediction Problem: Applied NLP in the Age of Generative AI

Reality is not an End-to-End Prediction Problem: Applied NLP in the Age of Generative AI dotAI

Applied NLP in the Age of Generative AI

Applied NLP in the Age of Generative AI PyData Amsterdam Keynote

In this talk, Ines shares the most important lessons we’ve learned from solving real-world information extraction problems in industry, and shows you a new approach and mindset for designing robust and modular NLP pipelines in the age of Generative AI.

10 Years of Open Source: Navigating the Next AI Revolution

10 Years of Open Source: Navigating the Next AI Revolution EuroSciPy Keynote

In this talk, Ines shares the most important lessons we’ve learned in 10 years of working on open-source software, our core philosophies that helped us adapt to an ever-changing AI landscape and why open source and interoperability still wins over black-box, proprietary APIs.

Show Us Your (Agent) Skills

Show Us Your (Agent) Skills PyMC Labs × Vanishing Gradients

What are people at the top of the game building with AI agents and how are they doing it? In this episode, 6 developers are sharing their workflows.

Style tips for less experienced developers coding with AI

Getting good performance out of LLM coding is less about prompts or agents, and more about the code you steer the model towards. Matt shares some lessons software engineers have learned over the years about building bigger things.

How AI is reshaping IT skills

How AI is reshaping IT skills connect professional

German article featuring Ines’ take on the impact of AI on future-proof skills for IT professionals.

E^2GraphRAG: Streamlining Graph-based RAG for High Efficiency and Effectiveness

E^2GraphRAG: Streamlining Graph-based RAG for High Efficiency and Effectiveness Zhao, Zhu, Guo, He, Li (2025)

Instead of using LLMs for entity extraction, we employ the traditional NLP tool spaCy to extract entities, and use their co-occurrence in a chunk as relations.

Conquering PDFs: document understanding beyond plain text

Conquering PDFs: document understanding beyond plain text PyCon DE & PyData

In this talk, Ines presents a new and modular approach for building robust document understanding systems, using state-of-the-art models and the awesome Python ecosystem.

How to advocate for modular NLP in the age of Generative AI

How to advocate for modular NLP in the age of Generative AI

With all the hype around Generative AI, many are led to believe it’s the solution to everything. So how can you, as a developer, communicate the nuances and advocate for new and modular solutions that are better, easier and cheaper?

📚 spacy-layout v0.0.12Mar 8, 2025

Support processing PDFs with context, add document index tables and more docs

Prozessvisualisierung mit generativer KI im Praxistest

Prozessvisualisierung mit generativer KI im Praxistest iX Magazin / Heise

German article by Nils Durner on visualizing technical processes with Generative AI, featuring spaCy and Presidio for PII anonymization.

Best Way to OCR a PDF in Python

Best Way to OCR a PDF in Python Python Tutorials for Digital Humanities

Tutorial by WJB Mattingly on how to use the new spaCy Layout package and Docling to convert PDFs to text.

PyLadies entrepreneurs and career development

PyLadies entrepreneurs and career development PyLadiesCon

Panel discussion about career challenges and starting your own business with Cheuk Ting Ho, Tereza Iofciu, Anwesha Das, Una Galyeva and Ines.

🔌 prodigy-pdf v0.4.0Nov 25, 2024

Add text-based span annotation for PDFs

Distill Your LLMs and Surpass Their Performance

Distill Your LLMs and Surpass Their Performance InfoQ Magazine

In her presentation at InfoQ Dev Summit, Ines Montani provided the audience with practical solutions for using the latest state-of-the-art models in real-world applications and distilling their knowledge into smaller and faster components.

✨ prodigy v1.16.0Oct 22, 2024

Modal plugin for on-demand deployment, cross-platform wheels and UI fixes

Applied NLP with LLMs: Beyond Black-Box Monoliths

Applied NLP with LLMs: Beyond Black-Box Monoliths PyBerlin

In this talk, Ines shows some practical solutions for using the latest state-of-the-art models in real-world applications and distilling their knowledge into smaller and faster components.

Combining the Best of Two Worlds: From TF-IDF to Llama LLM

Combining the Best of Two Worlds: From TF-IDF to Llama LLM Open Source Summit Europe

Talk by William Arias, Staff Developer Advocate at GitLab, on combining traditional NLP techniques and LLMs to solve hallucination issues and create robust spaCy applications.

Assessing Fine-Tuned NER Models with Limited Data in French: Automating Detection of New Technologies, Technological Domains, and Startup Names in Renewable Energy

Assessing Fine-Tuned NER Models with Limited Data in French: Automating Detection of New Technologies, Technological Domains, and Startup Names in Renewable Energy MacLean, Cavallucci (2024)

In order to assure the uniformity of the process of fine-tuning each model, we decided to use the spaCy library. This library, one of the most widely used for NLP tasks, allows us to directly modify a simple configuration file in order to define the model.

Building Multimodal Corpora Using Microtask Pipelines and Local Annotators

Building Multimodal Corpora Using Microtask Pipelines and Local Annotators Hotti, Vázquez, Jokipohja, Kalliokoski, Paakki, Suviranta, Hiippala (2026)

To create the infrastructure needed for supporting this effort, we repurpose an existing commercial annotation tool, Prodigy, which we then enhance with additional components for combining the annotation tasks into pipelines, cross-validating the annotations and supporting annotator access to tasks.

RiCoRecA: rich cooking recipe annotation schema

RiCoRecA: rich cooking recipe annotation schema Ventirozos, Jacob-Romero, Alrdahi, Clinch, Batista-Navarro (2026)

The annotation process consists of two sections. Firstly, the annotator utilized a customized Prodigy interface to complete the NER and RC annotation tasks.

Sovereign AI systems instead of black box solutions

Sovereign AI systems instead of black box solutions it-daily

German article featuring Ines’ take on AI in industry, the role of open source, and using Generative AI to create systems.

Developer Trends in 2025

Developer Trends in 2025 TalkPython Podcast

Discussion with Michael Kennedy, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Gina Häußge, Richard Campbell and Ines.

Keyword Extraction, and Aspect Classification in Sinhala, English, and Code-Mixed Content

Keyword Extraction, and Aspect Classification in Sinhala, English, and Code-Mixed Content Rizvi, Navojith, Adhikari, Senevirathna, Kasthurirathna, Abeywardhana (2025)

Keyword extraction in English is performed with a hybrid approach comprising a fine-tuned spaCy NER model, FinBERT-based KeyBERT embeddings, YAKE, and EmbedRank, which results in a combined accuracy of 91.2%.

How Love Without Sound helps the music industry recover millions in revenue for artists with NLP, spaCy and Prodigy

How Love Without Sound helps the music industry recover millions in revenue for artists with NLP, spaCy and Prodigy

A case study on Love Without Sound’s innovative AI-powered tools for the music industry and law firms specializing in royalty negotiations.

✨ prodigy v1.18.0Feb 24, 2025

Text editing during NER and span annotation, custom translations and more JavaScript features

What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI

What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI

How will AI development look in the future? There is a lot we can learn from another groundbreaking technology: the web. This blog post takes a look at what the history of the web can teach us, and what this means for developers, models, open source and regulation.

Streaming spaCy

Streaming spaCy

Join spaCy author and core developer Matt as he works on the library, develops features and fixes bugs, while chatting about all things NLP and open source. Every Thursday at 2pm CET and Friday at 11am CET.

Recognising non-named spatial entities in literary texts: a novel spatial entities classifier

Recognising non-named spatial entities in literary texts: a novel spatial entities classifier Kababgi, Grisot, Pennino, Herrmann (2024)

In this paper, we present a case study on the prediction of what we call ‘non-named spatial entities’ (NNSE) in a historical corpus of Swiss-German novels using a deep learning model in conjunction with BERT and Prodigy.

✨ prodigy v1.17.0Nov 18, 2024

Pages UI for multi-page tasks like longer documents, PDFs or collections of images

Serverless custom NLP with LLMs, Modal and Prodigy

Serverless custom NLP with LLMs, Modal and Prodigy

In this blog post, we’ll show you how you can go from an idea and little data to a fully custom information extraction model using Prodigy and Modal, no infrastructure or GPU setup required.

The 100 who are shaping AI in Europe

The 100 who are shaping AI in Europe

Ines is featured among the top 100 individuals who are shaping Artificial Intelligence in Europe, compiled by French newspaper l’Opinion.

💫 spacy v3.8.0Oct 1, 2024

Memory management for persistent services, numpy 2.0 support

How GitLab uses spaCy to analyze support tickets and empower their community

How GitLab uses spaCy to analyze support tickets and empower their community

A case study on GitLab’s large-scale NLP pipelines for extracting actionable insights from support tickets and usage questions.

The NLP and AI Revolution with the spaCy Creators

The NLP and AI Revolution with the spaCy Creators Vanishing Gradients

In this interview with Hugo Bowne-Anderson, we delve into the forefront of NLP and the future of AI development, covering topics like human-in-the-loop distillation, open-source AI and Explosion’s journey.

Vibe NLP for Applied NLP

Vibe NLP for Applied NLP PyCon DE & PyData

What if we could take learnings from AI-powered coding agents and apply them to solving real-world NLP problems? In this talk, I’ll show how we’ve built a powerful virtual NLP assistant to help developers create practical and modular solutions that are small, fast and fully data-private.

Engineering a human-aligned LLM evaluation workflow with Prodigy and DSPy

Engineering a human-aligned LLM evaluation workflow with Prodigy and DSPy

This post demonstrates a human-in-the-loop workflow for developing and evaluating LLMs, using Prodigy and DSPy to create task-specific, human-aligned metrics that guide model optimization beyond generic evaluation measures.

Conquering PDFs: document understanding beyond plain text

Conquering PDFs: document understanding beyond plain text PyData London

In this talk, Ines presents a new and modular approach for building robust document understanding systems, using state-of-the-art models and the awesome Python ecosystem.

AI in Reality Fireside Chat: Enterprise AI & Open-Source Innovation

AI in Reality Fireside Chat: Enterprise AI & Open-Source Innovation PyCon DE & PyData

Panel discussion with Alexander CS Hendorf, Dr. Alexander Beck, Walid Mehanna and Ines.

KI ohne Ketten: Warum Open Source gegen Big Tech gewinnen kann

KI ohne Ketten: Warum Open Source gegen Big Tech gewinnen kann UNMUTE IT Podcast (German)

Interview with Ines on open source, LLMs, ethics and sustainable AI development.

Künstliche Intelligenz: Technologie der Zukunft – und warum Open Source die Karten neu mischt

Künstliche Intelligenz: Technologie der Zukunft – und warum Open Source die Karten neu mischt Heise KI-Woche 2025 (German)

German talk on the future of Artificial Intelligence and the impact of open-source software and models.

What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI

What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI PyCon+Web Keynote

In this talk, Ines takes a look at what the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI, and what this means for developers, models, open source and regulation.

Prodigy Dashboard Plugin

Prodigy Dashboard Plugin

The new dashboard plugin adds a web application for managing annotations, data analytics and annotation progress, and is now available for early beta testing.

Cracking the Code: How to Start a Career in AI

Cracking the Code: How to Start a Career in AI Welcome to the Jungle

Short video interview with Ines about the 4 skills job hunters can cultivate for a career in artificial intelligence.

From PDFs to AI-ready structured data: a deep dive

From PDFs to AI-ready structured data: a deep dive

This blog post presents a new modular workflow for converting PDFs and similar documents to structured data and shows you how to build end-to-end document understanding and information extraction pipelines for industry use cases.

🔌 prodigy-pdf v0.3.0Nov 18, 2024

Support multi-page PDFs in a single view

Accelerate your Career with Open-Source AI

Accelerate your Career with Open-Source AI dotAI

Panel discussion about making a career out of open-source software, featuring Gael Varoquaux (scikit-learn), Steeve Morin (ZML) and Ines.

Taking LLMs out of the black box: A practical guide to human-in-the-loop distillation

Taking LLMs out of the black box: A practical guide to human-in-the-loop distillation InfoQ Dev Summit

LLMs have enormous potential, but also challenge existing workflows in industry that require modularity, transparency and data privacy. In this talk, Ines shows some practical solutions for using the latest models in real-world applications and distilling their knowledge into smaller and faster components that you can run and maintain in-house.

Szczecin stolicą programowania

Szczecin stolicą programowania TVP3 Szczecin

News segment about EuroSciPy 2024 on local Polish television, featuring Ines’ talk and interviews with the organizers.

spaCy Chunks v0.0.2

spaCy Chunks v0.0.2

spaCy extension and pipeline component for generating overlapping chunks of sentences or tokens from a document.