Scale By The Bay 2020: David Talby, State of the art natural language understanding at scale

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Natural language understanding is a key component in many data science systems that must understand or reason about text. Common use cases include information extraction, summarization, sentiment analysis, document classification, language modeling, and disambiguation. This talk introduces the Spark NLP library - the world's most widely used NLP library in the enterprise. Accuracy, speed, and scalability benchmarks and design best practices for building NLP, ML and DL pipelines will be shared. The library implements core NLP algorithms including lemmatization, part of speech tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition, spell checking, document classification, and sentiment detection. The talk will demonstrate using these algorithms to build commonly used pipelines, using live Python notebooks that will be made publicly available after the talk. David Talby John Snow Labs CTO David Talby is a chief technology officer at John Snow Labs, helping fast-growing companies apply artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems in healthcare & life science. David is the creator of the Spark NLP library and has extensive experience in building and operating web-scale data science and business platforms, as well as building world-class, Agile, distributed teams. Previously, he was with Microsoft’s Bing Group leading business operations in the US and Europe, and at Amazon in Seattle and the UK, where he built and ran distributed teams that helped scale Amazon’s financial systems. David holds a PhD in computer sc…