Sorry to say they dropped the ball on this one. The last course of this specialisation has the most advanced topics thrown at you in just three weeks, and it's even more cookbook-like than in the previous courses. The material of this part of the specialisation would require a whole course in itself, perhaps for +10 weeks. Here, I found it is at best a guide for self-study, _if_ you have the time for that. Also, support in the forums was very minimal.

There are some challenges with the videos eg. repetition, blank audio, variability in speaker's volume (difficult to hear). In particular perhaps 'Bleu score' needs to be redone. I did not enjoy the labs mostly because I don't have much interest in NLP BUT the 'emoji' and 'trigger word' labs were excellent! Especially the 'trigger word' lab should be the standard for all labs, it was very well written: clear, good flow, no mistakes.

All over, the course is designed well to introduce new concepts and make the students familiar with the new ideas. The labs help us give a better understanding of real life practical usage. MAJOR DOWNSIDE: WEEK 4, Transformer architecture explanation was done very poorly. Many students completed the labs and assignment by somehow copying code and formulas from other sources without much of a proper understanding. Please work on this.

The scope of this course was highly relevant to me, but unfortunately many of the class materials were broken or otherwise incorrect, making some ungraded portions of the assignments difficult or impossible to achieve. Activity on the discussion boards indicates many people have tripped over this for at least the better part of a year, but no corrections have been made. This was quite frustrating and wasted a good amount of my time.

I took this course after a long pause after I finished the first 3 courses. I would NOT recommend doing it that way. As a result, I felt rusty on some of the coding practices.

I think the course gives great introductory information on RNNs and LSTMs. The first two weeks of the course are spot on. However, I think the third week is lacking. I had hard time making a connection between the lecture material and the assignments.

This course was at a really high-level and barely scratches the surface of Sequence Models. Didn't really go into much detail behind any of the theory, and the programming assignments were mostly done for us, so you don't really end up learning much. You certainly won't be ready to have a job solving NLP problems after taking this course. If you want that, you're better off going through actual college courses online.

First of all, the programming assignments are really copy-pastes. There is nothing really to storm your brain for. Second, many of the ideas presented in the video lectures are very brief and short, skipping the explanation parts. After taking this course, I now know the names of lots of algorithms and models, but that's all I know, only the names. To get broader knowledge on them, I have to look somewhere else now.

The course content and Andrew Ng are great. The submission process of the assignments is absolutely dreadful. You might get 0 points for correct answers or not, depeding on...well, I have no idea on what. Maybe it's Jupyter Notebook, maybe it's Keras or maybe it's something else. But you must have good search engine skills, since you will most likely spend a lot of time in searching the discussion forum for answers.

May be this is my observation but this is the 1st course where I am unable to understand most of the explanation by Andew Ng, and the course exercises are more like the python coding like slicing, dicing, filtering, and how come this course is same for last 3-4 years, not even objective questions, There has been a tremendous breakthrough in the field in last 3 years and the course content is still the same.

too much information for such a short course. We only get a very superficial understanding of concepts with very little practice to solidify our understanding. The assignments involve implementing very small parts of much bigger systems. I guess the course is ok to get a general idea of the concepts but for deeper understanding of the topics a longer course or multiple courses would be needed.

This is a very interesting topic. However, I believe the course itself can be improved. I believe there can be more information about NLP and sequence models in lectures. It would be nice to add lectures with practical suggestions about training and tuning sequence models. There were lots of typos and mistakes in notebooks that were found by other fellow students and not addressed by mentors.

The course overall isn't as good as the previous 4 ones especially for the PA part, I can pass the grader even with wrong output. The PA improvement sometimes just create more discrepancy. The PA is just a walk through of how to building those basis models, but those little bugs will drain extra hours to figure out. I think this course is kind of a prototype one especially on PA part.

Compared to the previous courses, this was a disappointment. There is not as much content as I expected and the homework exercises are not well prepared. If one spends more time with debugging than with "learning concepts" in a basic course like this, then something seems wrong.

Moreover, in a situation where so many people pay so much money (because of Andrew Ng's credit)...

That was tough, how the weights are stored and their dimensions inside the 'time steps' can be explained by adding one more video, btw the course is awesome if you want to learn the basics of sequence models, you should have completed the previous 4 courses before diving into this. I will always remain thankful to Andrew Ng for providing this type of platform.

Positives : Excellent lecture material. Assignments broadly are well structured. HIgh bar set by Andrew Ng. Negatives: Assignments have too many errors and mistakes as of Jan 2019 (especially but not only in the optional / ungraded sections) for me to be confortable 100% recommending the course. Instructions for assignments are also not fully fleshed out.

This course is good for introduction to sequence networks, but I felt this is not at par with the previous course 4 (CNN). This feels a bit hurriedly done, with many important things only just touched upon. This should have been a 4 week course like the previous module. Then due attention could have been given to the field of speech, audio, sequence domain.

The course is generally good. However there are some issues with lecture videos editing (some sentences are said multiple times), and with activities (e.g. default settings hardcoded in one of notebooks, didn't let have output shown as reference, also in some cases automated grader has some assumptions, which need to be found using trial and error method).

Great course, great activities and really good programming excercises.

I give it 3 stars because instructors let political views tainted week 3 videos and assignments of this course by introducing some techniques for 'debiasing' and making your neural networks more bias to gender equality political views. That has nothing to do with science.

I've got mixed feelings about the whole Specialization. Many very interesting topics, but on the other hands I don't feel like there's any takeaway knowledge for me. Until the very end I've been feeling completely lost in the exercices. I'm proud to have been able to hold on until the end but I'm not sure it's been an useful use of my time.

Really interesting course with fascinating applications. However, in terms of difficulty, it is a significant step up from all the previous courses. A lot of time is spent figuring out the syntax even though the concepts are crystal clear. ( Probably as it is a collaboration with NVIDIA). The programming assignments could be improved.

It´s a fairly good course, with lots of cool topics covered on it. My main complain would be that the subjects covered are dense enough to be arranged on a four or even five week course. Instead, for some reason, all the stuff has been squeezed within three weeks, which makes the lectures shallow and rather cryptic most of the time.

Things accelerate too fast. Vanilla Neural Networks are explained really nice and slow. One you arrive to RNNs , that have many configurations ( one to many, many to one, many to many ) Not only we don't go through each oen them but the course put GRU and LSTMS together with them in the same Week ... crazy. Very compact module.

The course was great, as ever. But some of the programming exercises were very frustrating. Oscillating from very easy to very difficult, with some unclear (and sometimes erroneous) instructions. I felt this was in sharp contrast with the previous 4 courses of this specialisation, for which the course and exercises were perfect.

the course covered a lot of essentials and gave me a rough idea of how stuff NLP and sequence models work. Though at the same time the content often left me confused and overwhelmed. the Convolutional Networks course was far better.

Overall its great work and I am thankful for hard work put behind the complete specialization.

Great lectures, great teacher!

I would have given 5 stars but for the problems in the exercises / grader. Some problems that are know for weeks or even months are not resolved. This causes many wasted hours for many hundreds of students. Please solve this and make it a 5 star course.

Many thanks to Andrew Ng and the mentors!