Lesson 3: Finding products, dates and order numbers in messages
55 min read·14 Oct 2026
Module 3 · Lesson 3 · About 45 minutes · Needs: basic Python; Lesson 1 of this module (the spaCy pipeline) helps but is not required
The situation
It is Monday 21 September 2026, project week 3. Dev, the workshop lead, retypes the same four things from every booking: which product, which service, what date and what price. He asks whether the inbox can underline them for him.
The message he forwards first is HT19, one of Ines's hand-written test messages: "Is the Full Service still £129? If so I'll book it for the 2nd of September." This lesson finds its three entities (simulated data), first with a model trained on news, then with rules and a model working together, and scores every step on the same 40 English test messages.