Duygu Altinok - Mastering spaCy: An end-to-end practical guide to implementing NLP applications using the Python ecosystem

An end-to-end practical guide to implementing NLP applications using the Python ecosystem

Duygu Altnok

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

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To my mother, lker, for her life-long support and endless love. To my sister, for her support and inspiration. To my besties, Umutcan, Simge, and Aydan, for their friendship and support.

Duygu Altnok is a senior Natural Language Processing (NLP) engineer with 12 years of experience in almost all areas of NLP, including search engine technology, speech recognition, text analytics, and conversational AI. She has published several publications in the NLP area at conferences such as LREC and CLNLP. She also enjoys working on open source projects and is a contributor to the spaCy library. Duygu earned her undergraduate degree in computer engineering from METU, Ankara, in 2010 and later earned her master's degree in mathematics from Bilkent University, Ankara, in 2012. She is currently a senior engineer at German Autolabs with a focus on conversational AI for voice assistants. Originally from Istanbul, Duygu currently resides in Berlin, Germany, with her cute dog Adele.

Kevin Lu is currently a student studying software engineering at the University of Waterloo, with experience in full-stack web development, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing, and is the founder of the Python package PyATE (Python Automated Term Extraction). His interests include discrete mathematics, data science, algorithmic optimization, and deep learning. In the future, he is interested in pursuing research in NLP with deep learning and applications of it in accelerating academic research.

Usama Yaseen is currently a PhD candidate at Siemens AG (Munich) and the University of Munich. His research interests lie in data-efficient information extraction. Before starting his PhD, he was the lead data scientist at SAP SE, where he led a machine learning team focused on information extraction from semi-structured documents. He holds a master's from the Technical University of Munich in informatics; his master's thesis explored recurrent neural networks with external memory for question-answering systems. Overall, he has worked at Siemens (AG) (on corporate technology research), SAP SE (on machine learning), and Intel Corporation (on software development).

Souvik Roy is an NLP researcher. He primarily works on recurrent neural networks and transformer model compression methodologies such as pruning, quantization, tensor decomposition, and knowledge distillation to reduce the challenges faced by larger models, including longer training and inference times. He is passionate about working with textual data to solve underlying problems. Souvik has a master's in engineering from the University of Waterloo, specializing in text processing. Additionally, he has worked with Scribendi on document summarization and grammatical error correction. Since then, he has been working in diverse industrial research labs.

Carlos Fernando Schiaffin is passionate about analyzing and describing the underlying phenomena of human language. He is an NLP developer currently focused on conversational AI. He has a degree in linguistics and is a self-taught Python programmer. For more than five years, he has been working on NLP systems to try to understand and explain some of the speakers' linguistic behaviors. He started his career as a data tagger and soon went on to design annotation processes for linguistic data in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Currently, he works with Rasa, spaCy and others, on the development of a conversational AI in Spanish. I thank Duygu Altinok for giving me the chance to participate in this book and my colleagues who always accompany my learning process.