NLP Class is live | Hacker News Reader

NLP Class is live

coursera.org

121 pointsanand_nalya37 comments

Cryptography http://www.crypto-class.org/ and Design and Analysis of Algorithms I http://www.algo-class.org/ class are live too.

I maintain a list of all these courses from Coursera, Udacity and MITx at http://www.class-central.com

Thanks, I was about to lose track of who did what.

Game Theory http://www.game-theory-class.org/ and Probabilistic Graphical Model http://www.pgm-class.org/ are going to start on March 19th.

Source: https://twitter.com/#!/coursera

Any news on Machine Learning? I'm starting to lose hope.

No need to lose hope. There already was an (excellent) machine learning class last semester, so they should have the material ready.

It's on hold. I got the email an hour ago:

  Thank you for your interest in Machine Learning. A launch date for this course
  is currently on hold. I am excited to offer our material online for free. We
  apologize for the delay and will be sure to let you know when we confirm a date
  for this course to go live. In the meanwhile, you might check out the five free
  online Stanford courses that will go-live on March 12 and March 19 at www.coursera.org.

  Thank you for your interest.

  Andrew Ng
  Machine Learning

All the material's still online, if you want you can just go ahead and start on it. I started yesterday. http://www.ml-class.org/

Finally! This class was supposed to start in January 2012, hopefully all the technical kinks are worked out. Does anyone know what the issue was? I believe all the Stanford online learning classes were affected.

My understanding is it wasn't technical issues, but rather legal/political wrangling with Stanford that affected both Coursera and Udacity's courses.

I believe the issues were administrative and legal rather than technical. My impression was that once the Stanford administrative bureaucracy got wind of what was happening with these courses, what started as a fun and entrepreneurial "let's change education" turned into much paper work and long meetings. I've found this is the typical academic response to anything truly innovative ;) (I also think this is partly why Thrun walked away from his tenure, to simply be able to work on changing the world without having to worry about all of the rest of it)

Plus it's outsourced to a third-party startup in some way.

You mean Coursera?

Today I watched the first lecture and started on the first assignment. I have all of Chris Manning's books and have read them, and I just ordered Dan Jurafsky's book on Amazon.

I have been doing NLP for a long time, and I expect to get a lot out of this class.

I liked the style of the introductory lecture, well done, and the way they have the auto-graded programming assignments set up looks slick.

I'm curious: considering you have read all of Manning's books and have been doing NLP for a long time, what do you expect to get out of the class?

I took one NLP class at grad school but I don't remember much of it (besides it was in Japanese, which is my 3rd language). I'm trying to decide whether to sign up for the course or just get one of the books and study it at my own pace. I'm tending to the latter since 10 hours a week is quite a lot to fit in my schedule.

A good question. I have and have read about a dozen books on natural language processing, but I am hoping to get a more solid foundation.

I find the lectures interesting. I went to school at UCSB and mostly my teachers were very good, but I expect the "best of the best" from Stanford.

I enjoyed writing the first homework assignment late last night. I thought that it was an easy problem, but the more I worked on it the better results I got.

I am also taking the Probabilistic Graphical Models class because I don't have much experience in that area - that is fresh and new material for me.

For those taking the course, make sure you don't miss the free pdf of the MR+S book that regularly shows up on suggested reading list: http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/pdf/irbookonlinereading.pdf

This is great, I have enrolled for this and for the algo course.

I have never studied NLP but I did an algo class at a brick university some years ago.

This being stanford however I am a little worried that my theory/math skills may not be up to the standard but I am hoping to wing it and brush up on what I need as I need it.

Wish me luck!

I don't think there's any need to worry. I was very much interested in Machine Learning and took Stanford course last year and prof. Andre Ng made it look so easy with focusing on practical aspect. Now I have a grasp on how things work practically it's easy to get going with the theoretical aspect (with mostly maths) and following CS229 full video set covering the original course.

Anyway good luck!

Seems like we have to sign up again, but with a Coursera account. There is also a Terms of Service to read through too.

Edit: This is just an observation. People who signed up at the end of last year might be out of the loop.

There is a circle on gplus for the game theory course students - http://ow.ly/9utYw

Anybody wants to create hn one for algorithms/nlp? Might come up quite useful.

So far there's a few forums for these new online classes, like the AIqus site[0], Udacity forums for CS 101[1] and CS 373[2], and a lot of IRC channels, the main hubs being at #free-class, #udacity, and #mitx on irc.freenode.net[3].

There's individual channels for each course as well, for Coursera courses they follow the pattern of the class url preceded by an octothorpe, so for the Design and Analysis of Algorithms I class at http://algo-class.org for example, the IRC channel for it is #algo-class. For the Udacity courses, they follow the pattern of ##udacity-<course number>, so for example ##udacity-cs101 and ##udacity-cs373

[0] http://www.aiqus.com/

[1] http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs101/

[2] http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/

[3] http://webchat.freenode.net

If you are interested in joining a learning group in SF around this class please see here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672184

With so many online courses happening concurrently, how are you guys choosing which courses to actually do? I work full-time and I find it really hard to squeeze some free time.

Me too, but I've signed up for most of them anyway. It's risk free and the only reward is personal: knowledge.

I signed up for almost all of them too. It's hard to choose which ones to fully dive into. I guess since they'll probably offer them again and again, I'll take one/two at a time.

Have to prioritize. Yes it's painful. I'd love to do all of them, but only have time for about one at a time, so pick the one with the highest value to you and focus on it.

Take comfort in the knowledge that now that they are going online, they'll still be there when you're ready for the next one.

I got all excited for a minute and thought this was about Neuro Linguistic Programming. :) Still, sounds very interesting - I should definitely check it out!! (wasn't so excited when I saw it was a different NLP - but got excited again when I found out wat it was)

No loss, Neuro Linguistic programming is a fraud anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming#Cr...

Do you have any experience with NLP?

Do you need experience with something that obviously doesn't make sense in order to point out that it obviously doesn't make sense?

Even the name Neuro-Linguistic Programming doesn't even make any sense.

Yes, I read Bandler and Grinder extensively and experimented with their techniques in the 80s, starting with happening across The Structure of Magic in the local university library, and ending, IIRC, with Using Your Brain For a Change, which includes transcripts from one or more of Bandler's workshops, and convinced me that he was a bullying fraud.

By then it was already clear that NLP concepts had no solid empirical or theoretical foundation and in any case did not improve my life in any way, but I was young and desperate enough for relief from the problems in my life that I held on to their promises way past any rational limit.

I just watched 'About the Course' Video, it felt awkward, looked like professor Jurafsky was reading from a blackboard. Also wondering if people taking the course planning to apply any of it in their daily work.

> wondering if people taking the course planning to apply any of it in their daily work

The company I work for is planning to create or buy in some kind of customer facing knowledge base app with support for NLP queries, which is a large part of the reason I registered.

Are the video links active ?

yes

Seriously, the first project is harvesting emails? With regular expressions?

Can't wait for a data structures class. And then, for an operating systems class.

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