You are what you read: Building a personal internet front-page with spaCy and Prodigy
2023-04-18 , B09

Sometimes the internet can be a bit overwhelming, so I thought I would make a tool to create a personalized summary of it! In this talk, I'll demonstrate a personal front-page project that allows me to filter info on the internet on a certain topic, built using spaCy, an open-source library for NLP, and Prodigy, a scriptable annotation tool. With this project, I learned about the power of working with tools that provide extensive customizability without sacrificing ease of use. Throughout the talk, I'll also discuss how design concepts of developer tools can improve the development experience when building complex and adaptable software.


Sometimes the internet can be a bit overwhelming, so I thought I would make a tool to create a personalized summary of it! In this talk, I'll demonstrate an open-source front-page project that allows me to filter info on the internet on a certain topic, customized and adapted to the user's preference.

While building this project, I have been able to further explore the open-source NLP library, spaCy, and the scriptable annotation tool, Prodigy. Part of this talk will discuss how this project was implemented with regard to data collection, annotation and modeling. I developed a custom annotation interface, created a spaCy NLP pipeline, and explored different model architectures.

Through the project, I learned about the power of working with tools that offer both good guide-rails and extensive customizability. In this talk, we'll also look at the design concepts of spaCy and Prodigy and how they've enhanced the developer experience for different types of projects, including my personal front-page. I'll discuss what I've discovered about how customizable tooling can improve the developer experience when building complex and adaptable software.


Abstract as a tweet:

The internet can be overwhelming, so I made a tool to create a personalized summary of it! Through building this internet front-page project, I've learned how the design concepts of tools like spaCy and Prodigy can facilitate the development of both complex and simple software.

Expected audience expertise: Domain:

None

Expected audience expertise: Python:

Novice

Victoria is a Developer Advocate at Explosion, where she supports the Natural Language Processing community around the popular open-source library spaCy, the annotation tool Prodigy and other developer tools. Besides running marathons, learning new languages, and building fun machine learning projects about music and food, she loves learning about natural language processing and ensures that the open-source community has everything they need to do the same.