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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Text Retrieval and Search Engines by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

4.5
stars
941 ratings

About the Course

Recent years have seen a dramatic growth of natural language text data, including web pages, news articles, scientific literature, emails, enterprise documents, and social media such as blog articles, forum posts, product reviews, and tweets. Text data are unique in that they are usually generated directly by humans rather than a computer system or sensors, and are thus especially valuable for discovering knowledge about people’s opinions and preferences, in addition to many other kinds of knowledge that we encode in text. This course will cover search engine technologies, which play an important role in any data mining applications involving text data for two reasons. First, while the raw data may be large for any particular problem, it is often a relatively small subset of the data that are relevant, and a search engine is an essential tool for quickly discovering a small subset of relevant text data in a large text collection. Second, search engines are needed to help analysts interpret any patterns discovered in the data by allowing them to examine the relevant original text data to make sense of any discovered pattern. You will learn the basic concepts, principles, and the major techniques in text retrieval, which is the underlying science of search engines....

Top reviews

JH

Sep 20, 2016

Great course for those trying to understand how ro analyse and process text data. It has the right amount of tools to help you understand the basics of information retrieval and search engines.

MS

Dec 28, 2020

Great introductory course. It has opened my eyes to new challenges that face information retrieval. DON"T TAKE THIS COURSE IF YOU WANT TO LEARN elasticsearch.

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176 - 191 of 191 Reviews for Text Retrieval and Search Engines

By Elio R

May 19, 2018

I expected more exercises

By Daniel B

Jun 28, 2020

This course covers text retrieval well. The topics are well chosen and the lectures are excellent.

However, there are small content issues that need to be addressed. This course has now been out for ~4 years, so they will likely never be addressed: 1) The smaller issue is that quizes are not written correctly to follow the lecture material. Various quiz questions come from material that's covered later in the course. 2) The larger issue is that the programming assignment is broken in many, many ways. In order to pass, you may need to read a large number of forum posts .. and hope that someone with your operating system and version has already solved the error. Further, some tasks even when completed correctly will not be accepted; it will be very frustrating trying to "trick" the online grader into accepting your correct answer.

If you want to learn the material and are prepared to deal with the problems that I mentioned, I would recommend this course.

By James M

May 24, 2016

The material is compelling and the lecturer is engaging, but the course is not well prepared. The assessments are not relevant to the material covered and there are no collateral materials (e.g., downloadable slides/handouts) available to assist in learning.

By Jbene M

Jul 4, 2020

Boarding Lectures.

By Felix K

Jun 16, 2018

The presentation of the lectures is done quite poorly:There is a constant humming of the presenters computer on most of the videos. The examples given are all very specific and concepts are not explained themselves in detail.The quizzes are not very well adjusted to the presentations in that sometimes tiny details of mentioned information are asked and on the other hand non straight forward transfers from the lectures are expected.Also in one of the quizzes topics from the next week are asked and the problem has not been fixed since 5 months even though there are heavy complains in the forums.

By Andrew S

Jul 31, 2017

The week 4 quiz has some questions from Week 5 material causing a low grade for my week 4 quiz. I've asked to have my week 4 grade dropped in the week 4 discussion fourm since it was based on a flawed quiz. Please read the forums and reply to everyone who had issues with the week 4 quiz and the honers project errors. No one seems to respond to these issues on the fourms except for other students agreeing that the week 4 quiz is flawed and that the honors section also has errors.

By Hamed S

Oct 3, 2020

Very poor cooperation From the instructor. Tools provided for the assignments are outdated. Stops working very often. Haven’t provided any alternatives also.

The videos were too much lengthy. It was very difficult to keep concentration for that period of time.

Overall, i am extremely dissatisfied. I won't recommend this course at all.

By David K

Mar 13, 2021

Lectures are great. However, the assignments are almost impossible to do. They use a library that is no longer being maintained. It doesn't compile on modern Linux versions. Also the quizzes sometimes ask questions on material that isn't covered until the next lecture.

By Yunxuan Z

Jun 28, 2020

This course is only based on the theoretical side, and it is very hard to understand if you do not have a strong CS or math background. The professor also used abnormal verbal language to demonstrate his idea, I do not recommend this course.

By Scott C

May 9, 2018

The quiz contains questions of topics missing in the lecture of the same lesson. The presentation of the information has a lot of room for improvement. Hope the course continues to improve.

By Alexander S

Oct 4, 2019

In Week 1 and 4 questions to pass the assignment are coming from one week later....

So the material provided every week to pass does not fit the assignment questions.

Should be improved.

By Deleted A

Aug 5, 2017

This is not very informational whatsoever. After some sifting, I did not find this course to be useful. I would rather complete a formal course on the topic at the university itself.

By Rex O

Aug 30, 2018

The most terrible specialization anyone would ever waste his or her time on! Sometimes i fell asleep lol

Time wasted.

By Heng C

Aug 31, 2020

I do not like pure theory. I wish to find more useful thing about manipulate docs.

By Leen A E

Jun 19, 2020

its so

Theoretical