That said, the course covered a lot of ground and touched on a number of different interesting/important topics. Some of the lecture material was a bit disorganized/had errors and didn't flow all that well from one topic to another but there was a lot of good material there, especially if you had enough background to appreciate it. I was comfortable enough but it was obvious that the expectations set by the prereqs were off.
Hopefully the course will run again with most of the kinks worked out and, perhaps, a better level-setting of what's needed to get the most out of the course.
Because the learner is quite a good fit for the task, it performs better in terms of speed/accuracy trade-off than many other algorithms, such as CRF.
A follow up post for statistical dependency parsing should be finished in about a month (it's down my queue...)