Lightning Lessons

Practical NLP with LLMs: From Messy Text to Value

Hosted by Doug Turnbull and Alexey Grigorev

Mon, Sep 29, 2025

3:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

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AI Bootcamp: From RAG to Agents
Alexey Grigorev
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What you'll learn

Practical NLP with LLMs

Learn how to handle everyday text problems, like cleaning, correcting, and interpreting messy user input using LLMs.

Turn Unstructured Text into Usable Data

Extract structure and meaning from unstructured text for downstream tasks.

Make LLMs Work in Practice

Move beyond toy demos and learn how to apply LLM-powered NLP in real-world engineering contexts.

Why this topic matters

Text is everywhere: tickets, logs, chats, docs. Traditional NLP is complex and slow, but LLMs make “good enough” NLP achievable for any engineer. We will show you how to turn messy text into usable insights and features quickly, helping you build smarter, faster, and more impactful systems.

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Principal AI Engineer in Search

Doug Turnbull is an expert in search technology and relevance engineering, currently serving as Principal Engineer at Daydream, where he builds hybrid search systems combining lexical and vector retrieval, and develops LLM-driven quality programs for e-commerce search.


Previously, he led machine-learning-driven search initiatives at Reddit, significantly improving search relevance through Learning to Rank methods. Doug also advanced e-commerce search at Shopify and served as CTO at OpenSource Connections.


He co-authored the influential book Relevant Search (Manning, 2016) and created popular open-source tools, including Quepid and the Elasticsearch Learning to Rank plugin. He regularly speaks at industry conferences, making search relevance accessible to engineers.

Alexey Grigorev

Principal Data Scientist | Book Author | Instructor to 100k+ Students World-Wide

Founder of DataTalks.Club · Creator of the Zoomcamp Series · ML Engineer & Author


Alexey Grigorev is the founder of DataTalks.Club and the creator of the popular Zoomcamp series. With 15 years of experience in software engineering and over 12 years in machine learning, he has built and deployed large-scale ML systems at companies like OLX Group and Simplaex.


An advocate for practical, hands-on education, Alexey has taught over 100,000 students, focusing on a code-first approach to help learners build real-world skills.


In the past, he was an active participant in data science competitions. A Kaggle Master, Alexey has achieved top rankings in several challenges, including 1st place in the NIPS'17 Criteo Challenge and 2nd place in the WSDM Cup 2017: Vandalism Detection.


He is also the author of several technical books, including the widely read Machine Learning Bookcamp.

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