For me it's the 7th Course completed on Courserea and by far the worst.

The topics covered by course are explained in an unclear way, with fast pace.

There are too many topics and too little time to explain them.

Lecturer constantly uses shortcuts and chaining when explaining new concepts.

Lecturer codes in a un-datascience way, ommiting dataframes and apply family functions, constantly looping trough lists instead.

And most annoying of all - you spend hours digging through forum to finish assignments, because each instruction is written in a very, very unclear way and autograder is set to accept only one anwer. Belive me, it's very frustrating - take a look at the forum of this course.

The professor needs to prepare students better for exams and assigments. Too few lectures.

I was expecting to learn at least something

This is a solid intro course to NLP that covers the basics. For what it is I do think it deserves a higher rating than the 4.0 it currently has. I was worried about the amount of complaints regarding the grading machine when I started, but I was fortunate to have only experienced a very minor, inconsequential problem. Maybe I was just too traumatized by grading problems with other courses (*cough yandex big data engineering cough*) that the grading machine in this course in comparison is pretty reasonable.

For further learning, I discovered the NLP course in the Advanced Machine Learning specialization. I must say that is much more in depth and cutting-edge. Would totally recommend it as a sequel to this course.

This course seemed much less useful than the other Python for Data Science courses:

1.) Too many topics addressed at surface level, instead suggest be more selective and go deeper in playing around with a smaller number of techniques/models

2.) The coding assignments felt very rote/mechanical, mostly I think was a tradeoff to try to touch too many individual techniques/models. Would have preferred assignments more like - try to achieve X practical objective (good classifier score, etc) in whatever way you think makes sense, playing with or looping through parameters of the techniques/models to get there

3.) There were a number of ambiguities and inaccuracies in the assignments that wasted a considerable amount of time for not just me but a lot of people - see the forums

This course is a headache. Much of the lecture videos have errors that are lazily corrected with popups. The assignments can be incredibly buggy with little help from the forums. Even worse these bugs have existed since the courses creation 3 years ago and they're still present. How have they not been addressed yet? It's unacceptable. If you're taking this for the specialization, then fine. Otherwise this is a strong pass.

I find that this course focuses more on theory rather than practical hands-on applications, and I don't particularly enjoy it. Also, the instructions in programming assignments are misleading or poorly worded. I have a lot of trouble ding these.

Compared to the first three courses in the specialization (which were all excellent) this course is total shite. The instructor just glosses over concepts at a very high level and clearly put little thought or effort into planning them. The only thing about the course that was remotely positive were the assignments. They were all poorly worded but by completing them I did learn several interesting/useful applications of Gensim and NLTK. Unless your goal is completing the specialization I wouldn't waste my time with the course. It's by far the worst Coursera course I've taken. Shame on the University of Michigan for putting their name on this course. It reflects poorly on them. I recommend they either remove it from the specialization or redo it.

This course is a real waste of time! They try to teach you how to swim without water involvement!!

I like the lecturer and his still in the first and second weeks. But, starting from 3rd week, the lecturer teaches nothing. He explains some basic concepts and you should answer the detailed/technical coding assignments. The assignments have nothing to deal with the lectures. The lectures have zero to very limited coding explanation, even though the course name has "APPLIED" and "PYTHON". I learned nothing from the lectures but I passed both 3rd and 4th assignments with 100, thanks to StackOverflow and online resources. Plus, outdated auto grader and material!

I am wondering who gives this course 5 stars. Fake reviews?

A complete waste of time. You are better off Googling the concepts as the explanations are absolutely inadequate. The homework is nice and challenging but the material covered in the lectures does not prepare you to complete it. You are pretty much on your own. Too bad that you need to take this course to complete the specialization. Definitely not worth the $80. Very disappointed!!!!

One of the worst courses I have ever attended. The subject is treated on the surface.

The exercises are sometimes not covered in the lectures. The auto-grader is badly configured.

It was annoying and frustrating to do the exercises. Sometimes an untold oderering of the results was expected. Sometimes an untold normalization has to be done.

The professor is wooden. The quizzes are ridiculously easy. The programming assignments nearly impossible. Beware the hidden workings of the auto-grader. If you're very lucky, one of the other students will prompt the TAs to action in the forums. This is, by far, the worst course in this specialization.

Other courses of this Specialization are very good but not this one. The main Instructor of this could have done a better job and grading of assignments has too much issues i would have chosen any other NLP course if it wasn't for this Specialization.

Worst course of the

specialization. The lectures were so shallow for the level required to approve. I learn from internet more than from this course. Also the automatic grader is out of date and full of bugs. Do not recommend at all this course.

Honestly, I was pretty disappointed in this course. Assignments consistently took much longer than indicated, in large part because of recurrent problems with the autograder and unspecified requirements in assignment instructions.

The video is still in python 2. Very limited instructions.

Short and concise introduction to text mining and natural language processing. The presentation of the instructor is very good. The course could be organized in a better way, more course material should be added. I like the assignments so much, they taught me a lot although I think there have some problem with the Grader. Overall it's a recommended course for a CS student.

Would love to see these courses have more practice questions in each weeks lesson. Would be helpful for repetition sake, and learning vs only doing each question once in the assignments.

Excellent course! Video lectures are high quality, with realistic problems and applications. Exercises are reasonably challenging, and all quite fun to do! Strongly recommend this course

Course needs to be taught better. Assignments were way too difficult. Usually this happened in 1 out of the 4 weeks in all the previous courses of this specialisation. This course had all assignments having students do lots of searching online and the forums. Other learners comments turned out to be a lifesaver. This should not be the case for the entire course.

Good information and practice assigment, but the lectures requires more in depth explanation. Also assigments some time are not complety clear. is missing a to add some reference book.

I felt i learnt quite a lot, However some parts of the assignments hadn't been explained at all in the course videos. I didn't feel the assignments were well explained.

Regretfully, this course has not kept the pace of the rest in the specialisation course. The learning material is not good and I have to look for external material in Internet to understand the matters. Also I had to spend too much time just figuring out how to get the assignments passed by the autograder, instead of spending the time solving good assignments.

Take this course only as part of the specialization. It has good introduction to NLTK but tends to jump to advanced concepts without much teaching. If you are new to the topic you may struggle. If you are not familiar with the concepts in course 3 of the specialization you may not know what is expected of you.

Autograder is a disadvantage that sometimes can take many hours to figure out. Also, this course was a let down compared to the previous in the specialization. I wish there were more examples.