Laura Biester

This course is extremely valuable to take for computer science students, as NLP is a very quickly growing field. A lot of content is covered and you get to see very current techniques and research. The beginning of the course is a little slow as it will be recap for anyone who has taken machine learning or deep learning. However, there are a lot of cool things covered in the later half, and the course culminates with a group project where you can dive into whatever topic interests you. Professor Biester does a great job balancing the lectures with hands-on coding activities, and I really enjoyed working through the homeworks that she created.

This course is extremely valuable to take for computer science students, as NLP is a very quickly growing field. A lot of content is covered and you get to see very current techniques and research. The beginning of the course is a little slow as it will be recap for anyone who has taken machine learning or deep learning. However, the …Read more

Not a fan of the professor. Her grading weird af. It's either satisfactory or not satisfactory and no where in between. So there is a chance that you will do a ton of work for a particular homework set but end up getting "not satisfactory", meaning that all of your work is wasted! Overall grading is just not fair. The homework reports are also the stupidest thing ever. The first half of the class was fine, at least we were learning stuff and doing coding to implement stuff. The second half is just almost useless since you are working on the project and all of the lectures are just ireelevant. Don't recommend this class or taking any class with Professor Biester(the grading system is horrible!!)

Not a fan of the professor. Her grading weird af. It's either satisfactory or not satisfactory and no where in between. So there is a chance that you will do a ton of work for a particular homework set but end up getting "not satisfactory", meaning that all of your work is wasted! Overall grading is just not fair. The homework report …Read more

This course was very project based, so strong proficiency in python really helps. Although Machine Learning is not a requirement, a lot of the concepts we talked about seemed like extensions of broader ML concepts, and students who had taken ML definitely had a leg up. There was an opportunity to revise on most of the homework assignments, and the parameters of a given assignment are clear. If you enjoyed Machine Learning or are interested in the intersection of machine learning and linguistics (and sort of linear algebra), this is the course for you!

This course was very project based, so strong proficiency in python really helps. Although Machine Learning is not a requirement, a lot of the concepts we talked about seemed like extensions of broader ML concepts, and students who had taken ML definitely had a leg up. There was an opportunity to revise on most of the homework assign …Read more