
NLP Class is live - anand_nalya
https://www.coursera.org/nlp/
======
dhawalhs
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>

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

~~~
DennisP
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/>

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

~~~
indubitably
You mean Coursera?

------
mark_l_watson
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.

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

~~~
chiurox
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
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
No loss, Neuro Linguistic programming is a fraud anyway.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-
linguistic_programming#Cr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-
linguistic_programming#Criticism_and_controversy)

~~~
dutchbrit
Do you have any experience with NLP?

~~~
Estragon
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.

------
scarface548
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
> 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
Are the video links active ?

~~~
anand_nalya
yes

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

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

