Ratings and Reviews for Applied Text Mining in Python

The course takes you through the important NLP topics, the instruction is decent, but the assignments are clunky and waisted many hours of my time unproductively.

Love the focus on conceptual text processing and practical guides to implementation in python, but the assignment grader was extremely specific for no reason, especially the Week3 assignment.

An excellent course, it gives a full introduction to text mining, what it is useful for, covers different techniques, provides challenging activities. Maybe it lacks of a practical activity in Week 4 before the assessment, but overall the course has very good content and an excellent instructor

This course provides an interesting introduction to natural language processing in Python. The lessons are well thought, they are brief and to the point. It is very exciting to discover all the tools at our disposal to work in this field. The main problem of the course, as it seems to happen in the whole specialization, is resolving the assignments. Usually, they are poorly described, which forces the student to review the forums to understand what they are asked to do. In addition, the part of the tasks related to the course's topic is usually very simple, sometimes trivial. On the other hand, several hours may be required to generate the specific data structures required by the autograder an dealing with weird issues, that is, much more time is devoted to deal with autograder problems than learning about the subject. I do not understand why this problem keeps repeating one course after another.

This course was just too theoretical. There were just too many lectures on the English language and nothing really practical. I learned nothing that I can actually use. There were hardly any useful text mining techniques that I learned.

Instructions in programming assignments are misleading or poorly worded. This is an issue with every module of this specialization but Text Mining has been spectacularily bad. You need to spend hours browsing the discussion group just to figure out what is expected. Mentors are doing a great job explaining in the forum, but there is no feedback loop - the instructions are never corrected. Sometimes you see a forum post about a misleading or simply wrong instruction, that is dated 6 months ago, and the instruction still hasn't been corrected. It's like no-one cares. I feel like 70% of the time I spent on this course wasn't learning Text Mining, it was dealing with ambiguous instructions or autograder issues.

overall a goods intro into text analysis

Well designed course. Learned a lot from it

Some good stuff here, but really drops in quality toward the end and became a real slog to finish. Shame, since the rest of the specialization has been outstanding.

I was disappointed by the lectures in this course. My impression is that extremely complex concepts are mentioned in passsing and poorly explained, while a large amount of time is spent on trivial examples. The programming assignments are more interesting and appropriately challenging (compared to other courses in the specialization), but leave me without any confidence that I could accomplish a text mining task in python independently.