Webtext2Insight: An introductory workshop to Applied Web Scraping, NLP, and GenAI for Business and Research

This four-day in-person workshop provides hands-on training in web scraping, natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI using state-of-the-art Python tools.

Instructors : Dr Simon van Baal, Dr Lukasz Walasek, and Dr Xingjie Wei

REGISTRATION OPTIONS HERE (opens in a new window)

Course Overview

The web is a vast resource of valuable data. How can businesses and researchers extract insights from it? Do people leave online reviews of your products you would like to use? Do people talk about your research topic online? Do you wonder how the sentiment of policy language on a topic is changing? This four-day in-person workshop provides hands-on training in web scraping, natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI using state-of-the-art Python tools.

Programming Languages: Python (AI tools: Hugging Face, OpenAI API)

After this course, you will be able to:

• Extract web data efficiently, while understanding the legal and ethical issues.
• Analyse and interpret text using NLP techniques such as Topic Modelling.
• Leverage sentence embeddings for Text Classification.
• Use generative AI (GPT models) for content creation, automation, and decision-making.

Who Should Attend?

This course is ideal for:

• Researchers and academics working with text data.
• Business analysts and consultants looking to apply AI-driven insights.
• Data scientists and professionals interested in web data extraction.

Requirements

Some exposure to programming (not necessarily Python) is beneficial.

If you are a beginner, let us know, so we can send you materials to get a head-start.

Course Structure

Monday 9 June - Day 1: Introduction to Python (Optional)

Learn how to complete programming tasks in Google Colab.
Learn Python syntax, including functions, loops, and error handling.

Tuesday 10 June - Day 2: Web Scraping

Learn how to extract data from websites ethically and efficiently.
Work with HTML, CSS, and APIs to collect structured data.
Hands-on project: Scraping real-world data.

Wednesday 11 June - Day 3: Natural Language Processing

Learn key NLP techniques: tokenisation, sentiment analysis, and topic modelling
Hands-on project: Apply topic modelling to derive insights from real data.

Thursday 12 June - Day 4: Embeddings & Generative AI for Business & Research

Use Hugging Face’s transformers for text embeddings and basic tasks like Named Entity Recognition.
Explore OpenAI’s GPT models for content generation and automation.
Hands-on project: Automatically code information from online reviews.

Why Take This Course?

• Practical & Hands-On: Learn by doing with real-world datasets.
• Cutting-Edge Techniques: Stay ahead with the latest AI and data analytics tools.
• Expert Instructors: Learn from experienced academics.
• Networking Opportunities: Connect with like-minded professionals and researchers.

Places are limited. Register now to secure your spot.

Indicative hotel prices (as at 08/05/2025)

About Leeds

Leeds is a friendly, multicultural city in the centre of the UK. It's one of the country's largest and fastest-growing cities and has a leading reputation in business, culture and sport.  It has a vibrant city centre, which offers a wide range of places to visit, eat and shop, but is also compact and easy to get around with regular public transport services.  Some of the finest English countryside is on our doorstep, including the Yorkshire Dales.

To find out more about what’s on offer in Leeds and Yorkshire visit the Welcome to Yorkshire website.