The concept is not clearly explained at all. The instructor seems to be just reading a script. He did not try to explain the math. Instead, he uses graphs to try to fool us. The other instructor hardly teaches anything but just to show his face and say a few openning setences. I took Andrew Ng's courses and was impressed, but I am very disappointed by the quality of this course. Deeplearning.ai, please have some quality control over the courses you offer, otherwise it hurts your brand name!

The course is rather disappointing. Videos are short. They give you an intuition, why something works but don't go much into the details. When teacher said "Now you are an expert in transformers" it sounds like a mockery. The course material is split into four weeks, however you can obtain certificate after spending a few days.

Homeworks won't teach you much. For you to understand, by now the most hard exercise according to course's Slack is to write a function with model and input tokens as input, which should predict next token. It's body contains only 8 lines of code, some of them is already given, your task is well explained.

Trax, a deep learning framework, that is used in homeworks might be a great framework, but not for learners. All you need to do, is just to pick a layer, put it in right place and

voila. But instructions makes a situation even worse. It is so detailed, that you can just copy a code from instructions, paste it into your code and obtain a working solution. Sometimes you should look at documentation just to see the argument's name. You won't have to think about dimensions, you won't have to think about structure of a model. When you decide to write a transformer from scratch with Pytorch then, you will struggle hard, but the price is much deeper understanding.

Would I recommend taking this course? I think, that course team did a nice work to provide you an overview of the state of the art techniques in NLP. Some references are amazing. So if you treat this course like intorductory, you could take it. But don't expect too much. When you are said, that you will "build a chatbot using a Reformer model" take in mind that the crucial skill to do it, is just a copy-pasting.

the NLP spec course has ~30min video on every week, and sum-ups are ~1/4 of it. Thus, one cannot expect a good and profound theory knowledge, only some intuition and insights.Without theory, it can be expected that program tasks should contain something practical and superficial. Like crash-course into the most popular packages in the field. But tasks are huge – x6 time more than a theory – and boring. A lot of spaghetti code with few levels of enclosed IF’s, with constructions like `A[i][j:k][l+1]`, low code reuse, global variables, and `from utils import *`.The student will spend time doing the bad implementation of 100K times implemented things, and that will not provide him with enlightenment on how they are implemented because of a lack of the theory.And nobody will teach him how to use standard tools on simple and understandable examples. It is boring, exhausting, and impractical. And in most cases, students can't do just part of tasks, because the auto checker will raise an error.

Superficial coverage of topics, lack of mathematical depth and sophistication. Dumbing down and simplification never help.

I haven't had similar issues with previous courses by Deeplearning.ai, but with this one I was worried I'm overly stupid the moment I started, because I noted I was "missing" a lot and was not understanding easily what's going on (Note: I have all required background from the ML Course and DL Specialization). Then I saw the existing reviews and was happy to see I'm not alone to feel like that:

- Overly superficial coverage of theory in videos; too many things not explained well (if at all). For example: last week's videos are about... 18 minutes. REALLY? I thought we were talking more complex stuff here. If one can be taught this in 18 minutes, then... oh well...

- Lots of "copy-paste this here" parts in assignments, too (not much thinking/effort required).

- The quizzes are (as in most courses) a joke, they're there just for the sake of it; I just skip them.

- Looks to have been created in too much of a rush; I don't know if that's the case, but that's the feeling I get from the content quality...

Based on the success of the original Andrew Ng courses, the quality bar is high as are the expectations. I hope there is better quality control in future specializations, either in-house or by better selection of external beta-testers. I can't believe several reviewers bring this up, but no one else did before the release.

Can the instructors make maybe a video explaining the ungraded lab? That will be useful. Other students find it difficult to understand both LSH attention layer ungraded lab. Thanks

Tricky course, not well explained. I had to struggle a bit to understand the various concepts.

To anyone looking to learn the content for the first time, I would suggest by reading the original papers and some blog posts. The videos are short and do not go in-depth much at all. The real meat for this course is in the homework assignments. The videos tend to oversimplify to the point of not explaining the concepts correctly or being flat out wrong and fail to give critical context to fully understand what is being explained. On the other hand, the homework was interesting (especially when compared to other courses out there) and did go in more depth, making students think through the details of some of the algorithms and models. tldr; learn the content elsewhere, take the course for the homework + to learn about trax.

Great specialization, however the 4th course was not cooked enough. It is the most complicated material, sure, so this is the place to put extra effort in preparing the lectures and labs. Instead, I got the feeling you push much too much into 1 course. You should consider splitting it. I hope someone read this feedback...

Started out nicely, but for Week3 and Week4 a lot of the concepts and details are skipped over or copy pasted.

Outstanding Course. The course was rigorous

Explanation in video lectures is very shallow. Have to read research papers or blogs for better understanding. Lecture videos can be made much better.

Not as details as enough. The quality of the course is very good at the start but decreases as the topics go deeper.

Every week's assignment brings a new challenge and it was fun to complete the assignments. Course Instructors explain concepts very well. This course teaches you from the beginner level to a professional level. Covers every topic related to NLP. I enjoyed learning NLP with Deeplearning.ai. I would like to thank deeplearning.ai for making this course.

Good course in overall. The last two weeks' assignment is a little bit too light. The instructor could introduce more about loading pretrained models and fine-tune them as it is a popular practice nowadays for small companies with limited resources (data/computation). Introduction to "easy-to-use" framework such as huggingface is highly recommended.

The course is so good and well presented. I really enjoyed the whole specialization. Thank you for this amazing course and the whole specialization which that me a lot. Thank you Andrew NG and deeplearning.ai team for this amazing specialization.

I learnt a lot about Transformers and Reformers which belong to the most advenced models for NLP tasks. The instructors were fully prepared though I'd prefer to see more animations in following courses. Thank you so much for spreading knowledge!

An amazing level of breadth and depth of the material presented. State of the art techniques are exemplified via carefully crafted lab assignments with sufficient hints for students to be able to comprehend hard technical concepts.

Great course! I really enjoyed extensive non-graded notebooks on LSH attention. Some content was pretty challenging, but always very rewarding!

Thank you!

Thanks Lukasz Kaiser and Younes Mourri ,Trax and coursera team!

This NLP specialization is most imporrtant and useful i've ever been before!

Everything was great.

Slides & notebooks/exercise were amazing

The content is superb and very up-to-date.

Loved the last week of the course, stood out amongst the other 15 of the specialization.

Critical to keep abreast of state of art models in NLP and new frameworks like Trax.

This course made the latest technology of NLP easy to understand and implement.

It is great. It helps us to learn and implement the latest NLP architectures.