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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Sequence Models by DeepLearning.AI

4.8
stars
29,838 ratings

About the Course

In the fifth course of the Deep Learning Specialization, you will become familiar with sequence models and their exciting applications such as speech recognition, music synthesis, chatbots, machine translation, natural language processing (NLP), and more. By the end, you will be able to build and train Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and commonly-used variants such as GRUs and LSTMs; apply RNNs to Character-level Language Modeling; gain experience with natural language processing and Word Embeddings; and use HuggingFace tokenizers and transformer models to solve different NLP tasks such as NER and Question Answering. The Deep Learning Specialization is a foundational program that will help you understand the capabilities, challenges, and consequences of deep learning and prepare you to participate in the development of leading-edge AI technology. It provides a pathway for you to take the definitive step in the world of AI by helping you gain the knowledge and skills to level up your career....

Top reviews

MK

Mar 13, 2024

Cant express how thankful I am to Andrew Ng, literally thought me from start to finish when my school didnt touch about it, learn a lot and decided to use my knowledge and apply to real world projects

JY

Oct 29, 2018

The lectures covers lots of SOTA deep learning algorithms and the lectures are well-designed and easy to understand. The programming assignment is really good to enhance the understanding of lectures.

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2776 - 2800 of 3,620 Reviews for Sequence Models

By Brad M

•

Aug 22, 2019

A very helpful and enlightening course, though it felt a bit "hand-wavy" at times. It never really felt like we were getting the full story, like I was missing something the whole time. Word embeddings cleared up a lot, but the entire course was a lot of information to digest at once. Coming from an image processing background, most of the terminology was unfamiliar, and the programming assignments weren't quite as guided as previous ones.

In the end, I think it was a great course, and I'd recommend it highly to anyone interested in the field. If you can't apply it to your work, it probably isn't as beneficial.

By cricel472

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Oct 18, 2023

It's a lot of great content for becoming aware of all the various concepts in deep learning. And it does a great job of pointing at the original papers explaining all of those things. The homeworks are often very pointless: a lot of learning exactly what things they want you to copy paste, but minimal understanding of the actual algorithms, especially for the later more complicated ones. (Transformers remain a complete mystery to me, this course did not explain them sufficiently or connect them to CNN or anything else clearly, and the homework was especially meaningless in this regard.)

By Marc A

•

Mar 26, 2019

I'm a fan of Andrew Ng's machine learning classes on Coursera. This was my least favorite. I'm not sure if it's because of the complexity of the material or that so much material is presented in a short time, but I feel that I'm not as confident about my knowledge of the material in this course compared to the earlier courses. In the last few assignments, I felt like I was mechanically plugging stuff in without really understanding the thought process. His teaching style seems much the same as the other courses though, so it's possible this could be due to me rather than the course.

By Deleted A

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Jul 11, 2018

I am grateful for the opportunity to have learned from an exceptional instructor, and one of the luminaries, in artificial intelligence. Insofar as this particular course is concerned, theory was well explained, as always. I feel like there was a bit of a disconnect in the implementations, though. Some of this was just the sheer challenge of using a still-unfamiliar platform (Keras). And, in concert with this latter point, some was due to a sort of "fill in the blank" approach to using the platform. Nonetheless, that I have learned, and learned a lot, is undeniable!

By Emil H

•

May 28, 2023

the last exercise is a bit hard to understand especially

the Exercise 4 - EncoderLayerhttps://ntwjrryqcvtz.labs.coursera.org/notebooks/W4A1/C5_W4_A1_Transformer_Subclass_v1.ipynb#Exercise-4---EncoderLayer

which says You will pass the Q, V, K matrices and a boolean mask to a multi-head attention layer. Remember that to compute self-attention Q, V and K should be the same. Let the default values for return_attention_scores and training. You will also perform Dropout in this multi-head attention layer during training. 

altough Q,V,K does not come in as function inputs.

By Raja K

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Nov 30, 2020

a more intuitive materials been used while teaching would be helpful to more effieciently and enjoyably grasp the concepts. what i mean is that the description or the summary the lessons been taught in a week are in the corresponding week's assignments; those summarys were more clear and visually pleasing than the inclass presentation. for example, usage of pens for drawing networks and the likes can be migrated to better animations ,etc. the crux is that the content in the course is great, but it feels like there is a good scope for improvement in presentation.

By Deni

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Apr 21, 2018

Firstly, thank to the course instructors and Dr.Ng for teaching us deep learning. You are all a gem. I enjoyed this course, and how simple it made coding RNNs. However, I believe the concepts could be simplified some more, even in the form of a pseudocode or conceptual outline. This is my 3rd course from Andrew Ng, so I know he's skilled at distilling deep learning concepts with ease. Week 1 was the best for me as the operation of the LSTM, GRU RNNs were succinctly outlined and set a solid foundation , Week 2 could be presented a less abstract way though.

By Nkululeko N

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May 2, 2020

I think with sequence models, the course details were very challenging. I strongly believe that do take a course in Deeplearning Specialization, one must at least learn Python from basics to advanced level. However, Andrew Ng has made it easy for a first time student with programming background to understand most of the concepts in this specialization. Thank you Deeplearning.ai for this course. I have learned some of the cutting-edge skills that can't be easily found anywhere. I have learned a skill that will set me apart from the crowd.

By John O

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Jan 30, 2021

I really enjoyed this course. I'm not crazy about the fill-in-the-blank style of the programming assignments. I think I'd learn the material better if it just gave me the arguments and returns of the functions and forced me to write everything in between. I think it makes sense to emphasize keras in the later parts of this sequence, but I feel like I never got a basic introduction to how models in keras are supposed to be structured. Maybe there should be an assigned reading on this, if not a video or an optional programming assignment.

By John B

•

Sep 20, 2018

Great content, and leaves me set to build systems making predictions for or conversions between sequences- particularly including text posts, which are an interest of mine.

Deducted a star because a couple of ungraded exercises contained errors which had been left uncorrected; they were still valuable, especially the manual implementation of backprop one, but there's some missing attention to detail there. But the level and effectiveness and practical applicability of the course remains excellent and I'd still heavily recommend it.

By Shivdas P

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Jan 5, 2020

I found the first week of this course a bit tough compared to all the other 4 courses in this specialization. Perhaps there should be one more week to give much more programming exerises to help understand the concepts clearly. But having said that, the last two weeks, especially the last one about hot-word, is very neatly done and provides very good understanding of such models are implemented. Overall satisfied. Thanks Andrew and team, I feel much more confident in my understanding of these terms and the concepts behind them.

By MC W

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Apr 9, 2018

I never been exposed to this subject Sequence Models before. I learned a lot from this course. But the materials is more advanced than all previous ones, especially the program exercises. The exercise guideline is helpful but not leave many guess works for students not well skilled in Python and Keras. I completed the program exercises by blindly trying different keras commands.

Little suggestion: include a short but complete example code for building Keras Sequence models in the tutorial.

Over all, a great course. Thanks a lot.

By Kai H

•

Feb 10, 2019

Overall, it is very good course unless for some minor problems with the assignments.

For example, in Week1 the optional assignment, there are many bugs there, one may waste a lot of time trying to figure out the correct solutions. Though, it has been widely discussed in the forum, the instructors should have updated the material or at least warn the students somewhere in the assignment to read forum ahead of time. You must admit that many won't resort to the forum only after trying and wasting enough time..

Hope may help.

By Conor G

•

Nov 6, 2018

Much more challenging than the other courses in the DL specialisation. It forced me to delve a little deeper into the topic in order to overcome obstacles in the assignments. Content-wise, it's a great introduction to DL for NLP. Professor Ng's explanations are perfect.

Admittedly, compared to the other courses, this one is "messier". Spelling mistakes, some contradictory instructions, and a somewhat broken notebook for the last assignment. It felt rushed and I'm surprised that a lot of the errors haven't been fixed yet.

By Li Z

•

Feb 23, 2018

The course itself is cutting-edge, so a 5-star for this.

But the following amount to a -1 star:

1 Too sloppy, lots of typos.

2 Wrong answers wrong expected values in the notebook.

3 Grading server sometimes runs slow.

4 Saving the notebook fails quite often.

5 Too much is done for the learners, while you could've make the programming assignments more challenging.

6 Deep learning itself has too much black magic and inexplanability in it.

I'm quite sure that harsher comments and a few 2-star or 3-star will be among the reviews.

By Deleted A

•

Nov 19, 2020

In general, about all the specialization, I think that some of the programming assigments could be more didactive to understand the concepts of the courses and not to find what the code is doing in that specific task. For all the others aspects of the course I think it's perfect for a litlle bit more than an introduction.

For the last course, I feel that some concepts were explained very fast and for some of these i took me a lot of time to understand what I was doing.

Congratulations for all the good work you made.

By Dan C

•

Sep 27, 2023

The lectures were very helpful - Dr. Ng has a gift for providing context and intuition. The programming assignments were not as instructive as I would have hoped since they mostly involved "fill in the blanks" and matrix math operations. I would have liked more "ground up" development that forced me to learn how to create solutions on my own vs be dependent upon scaffolding and examples. I know that's hard from an automated grading perspective, but perhaps one keystone assignment per class makes sense.

By Ed S

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Oct 21, 2018

It's a good intro to RNNs (LSTMS and GRU). Very interesting use cases for RNNs. I feel that there could have been more room to try more programming exercises for different use cases & RNN architectures. Be aware that Keras is very sensitive to changes and you will find yourself reloading the jupyter kernels repeateadly when you get stuck. This is not a problem of the course itself but it is something that could end up wasting a lot of your time chasing problems when your code actually should work.

By Steven K

•

Jan 18, 2023

The lecture videos are great. Andrew is a great teacher in teaching concepts at the most intuitive level. By the time I finished the course, I had sufficient knowledge to be able to read and understand the paper.

One shortcoming of the course is that - the applied coding skills you gain from the course are quite limited, as the quiz and the assignments are a bit too simple. I wish there could be an optional advanced version of quizzes and assignments that are more thought-provoking.

By Joseph C

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Apr 19, 2018

Another great course by Andrew Ng! This course is part of the CS230 class currently being taught at Stanford University. Only reason for 4 rather than 5 stars is that at this stage (April 2018), there are few knowledgeable mentors and virtually no Instructors present in the Forum. Course provides little introduction to the syntax of Keras, which makes for some problems implementing models. Therefore one might spend a lot of time spinning one's wheels until finding a way forward.

By Nam N

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Aug 11, 2021

This last course is the most difficult challenge in the entire specialization, I personally have to watch back the video lectures many times. But I appreciate Andrew's efforts in transmitting knowledge in the most possibly understandable way. In the assignment section, I found it necessary to have advanced experience in Python to be able to comprehend. Even if you have completed all the exercises, I believe most of you would only understand about 30-40% what you were doing.

By Andreas B O

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Jan 23, 2020

As with all the 5 courses in the Deep Learning Specialization, the video lectures were amazing, thoughtfully designed (and separated) and gave an understandable overview of the content. As for the programming assignements, some lack a clear description of what is to do - that mostly concerns single steps withing a sub-task though. Tensorflow and Keras need a considerable amount of self-study next to the lectures to truly understand what you are doing there.

By Luisa F A S

•

Sep 8, 2022

NLP is definitely my favorite application of DL. This course was fun, although W4's assignment was quite confusing. Maybe it'd be nice to clarify that though the labs are ungraded, they'll help the learner deepen understanding of concepts and to explicitely recommend that they're completed before the assignment, so overall learning process becomes smoother.

But in general the course and the specialization were quite fulfilling, thanks a lot to the staff.

By Mislav C

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Jul 3, 2022

Theoretical knowledge gained during this course is good, for beginners in this area they learn what can be done and how. Only minus is practical assignements which are too straightforward, it's helpfull to have guide what to do, but maybe some assignement which doesn't have too much of a guide could be good (not necessarily the one which is graded but something which makes you to think a little bit more rather than follow the tips and writing Python code).

By Guilherme Z

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Sep 4, 2019

I enjoyed this course very much. The videos were very informative covering a lot of ground in RNNs. I also enjoyed the assignments which covered both implementation of RNNs from scratch to get a good feel for it, and practical implementations. I was a bit disappointed about NLP section as it brushed over word embedding and left me without much understanding on how they are estimated. I would also like to have seen time-series covered in this course.