In this talk, we will explore the build-measure-learn paradigm and the role of baselines in natural language processing (NLP). We will cover the common NLP tasks of classification, clustering, search, and named entity recognition, and describe the baseline approaches that can be used for each task. We will also discuss how to move beyond these baselines through weak learning and transfer learning. By the end of this talk, attendees will have a better understanding of how to establish and improve upon baselines in NLP.