NLP Class is live

121 points by anand_nalya 14 years ago | 37 comments

dhawalhs 14 years ago |

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

dhawalhs 14 years ago | |

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

redschell 14 years ago | |

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

DennisP 14 years ago | | |

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/

seancron 14 years ago | | |

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

lars 14 years ago | | |

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

pepijndevos 14 years ago | |

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

Rotor 14 years ago |

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.

Homunculiheaded 14 years ago | |

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)

rhizome 14 years ago | | |

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

packetslave 14 years ago | |

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

mark_l_watson 14 years ago |

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.

nandemo 14 years ago | |

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.

mark_l_watson 14 years ago | | |

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.

CodeJackalope 14 years ago |

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

jiggy2011 14 years ago |

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!

buddhika 14 years ago | |

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!

tareqak 14 years ago |

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.

pawelwentpawel 14 years ago |

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.

upgrayedd 14 years ago | |

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

smg 14 years ago |

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

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

chiurox 14 years ago |

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.

SkyMarshal 14 years ago | |

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.

fionabunny 14 years ago | |

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

chiurox 14 years ago | | |

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.

dutchbrit 14 years ago |

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)

Estragon 14 years ago | |

No loss, Neuro Linguistic programming is a fraud anyway.

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

dutchbrit 14 years ago | | |

Do you have any experience with NLP?

scarface548 14 years ago |

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.

Joeboy 14 years ago | |

> 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.

sun123 14 years ago |

Are the video links active ?

anand_nalya 14 years ago | |

yes

indubitably 14 years ago |

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

zackattack 14 years ago |

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

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