Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Review- Is It Worth It?

Are you looking for the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Review?… If yes, this article is for you. This Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Review will help you to decide whether to enroll in the program or not.

So, without further ado, let’s get started-

Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Review

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural Language Processing is a trending field nowadays. You can see various applications of NLP.

When you have any product query, you complain to customer support. And in most cases, you get a reply within a few seconds. And this reply is not from any human this is a ChatBot. A chatBot is an application of Natural Language Processing.

Another typical example of NLP is Speech Recognition. When you ask anything to Google assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Cortana, they process with your language and try to give the best answer to your question.

Many businesses are implementing NLP. That’s why there is a high demand for Natural Language Processing in the market.

To learn NLP, various courses and tutorials are available. And Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree is one of them.

In this review, I will share the positives and negatives of the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree. And also share whether it is worth it for you or not.

So, let’s start with the Price and Duration of the program.

How Much Time and Money Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Required?

According to Udacity, the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree program will take 3 months to complete. And for 3 months, they charge around $750. Udacity provide two methods for enrollment- One is monthly payment another one is bundle payment. In monthly payment, they charge $300/month

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Is Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Worth the Money?

At this price, I would say Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree is not worth it.

Why?

Because you will learn the concepts from other courses that are not expensive as Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree.

But if you get the Udacity NLP Nanodegree at low cost by applying some discount coupon code, then I would say this program is good for learning NLP.

How to get Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree at a Low Cost?

For this, you have to check for their current offers. Luckily, most of the time, Udacity provides discounts and offers.

You have to visit the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree page.

As you can see Udacity’s current offer is “Personalized Discounts”. In this offer, they are providing discounts of up to 70%.

You need to click on the “New Personalized Discount” button and on the next page, Udacity will ask two questions. Answer these questions and you will get a discount with a unique coupon code.

Copy this code and paste it at the time of payment. By doing this, you will save 70% on the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree fees.

Is Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Content and Projects Worth It?

Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree has 3 courses and 3 projects. This Nanodegree program is the perfect program for those who want to work on hands-on practices. Because throughout this program, you will work on 3 projects.

These are the 3 courses-

1. Introduction to Natural Language Processing
2. Computing with Natural Language
3. Communicating with Natural Language

Each course has one project.

Course 1- Introduction to Natural Language Processing

This is the first course of the program. And it is just an introductory course. This course covers various NLP techniques such as tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, part of speech tagging, and named entity recognition.

Tokenization is the first step in Data Preprocessing. Tokenization split the whole sentence into separate tokens. And Stemming normalizes words into their base form or root form.

These concepts are the basics of NLP.

At the end of this course, hidden Markov models are also covered. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a statistical model.

After this course, there is one project related to the concepts covered in the first course.

Project 1- Part of Speech Tagging

A word can have more than one Part of speech based on the context. For example, This sentence, ” ‘Google’ something on the Internet.”

Here, “Google” is used as a verb although it’s a proper noun. So, these are some problems that occur during preprocessing of NLP.

In this project, the Pomegranate library is used to build a hidden Markov model for part of speech tagging using a “universal” tagset.

The best part about Udacity is that they provide technical mentor support and you can clear your doubts with your mentor.

After completing the project, you have to submit your project in a zip file. And the reviewer will review the project and provide personal feedback based on your performance.

Course 2- Computing with Natural Language

In this second course, you will learn some advanced concepts of NLP and Deep learning. You will learn about Word2Vec and Glove.

Word2Vec and Glove are the embedding algorithms used in various NLP applications such as sentiment analysis, document clustering, question answering, etc.

You have heard about Sentiment Analysis. In this course, you will learn Sentiment Analysis and attention. Attention is the function and recent advancements in Deep Learning for performing NLP tasks.

So, this course is packed with various new and advanced concepts related to Natural Language Processing. After this course, there is another project.

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Project 2- Machine Translation

This is not an easy project. It requires previous Python and Machine Learning knowledge.

For this project, you have to create a Neural Network Model for Machine Translation. That can translate simple English sentences into French.

The following models are used and their performance will be compared-

1. Text Preprocessing,
2. Simple RNN Model,
3. RNN Model with an Embedding Layer,
4. Bidirectional RNN,
5. Simple Encoder Decoder, and
6. Encoder-Decoder

Course 3- Communicating with Natural Language

This is the last course of the Nanodegree Program. The instructor of this course explains the concepts with the help of various demos and exercises.

He explains Amazon AWS and how to build Alexa skills.

The main focus of this course is on speech recognition. Speech recognition is the most popular and used field. Whenever we ask Alexa to play a song. First, she recognizes the words and then processes them based on the instructions.

This course will teach the whole functionality of speech recognition.

After this course, there is the last project of this Nanodegree Program.

Project 3- Speech Recognizer

This project is to test your understanding of speech recognition concepts. This is an advanced project where you have to use Deep Neural Network for building a speech recognition pipeline.

For training and evaluating the model, the LibriSpeech dataset is used.

The Jupyter notebook is divided into three parts-

1. The first part is preprocessing. This part is already done for you. You only need to run the code.
2. In the second step, you have to build a model. You have to build 6 models. And then see which model performs the best.
3. In the last step, you are going to have a prediction.

Once you complete the project, the reviewer will check and approve your project.

So, this is all about the Courses and Projects of the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree program.

With respect to the content and projects, I would say the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree program is totally worth it.

The covered projects will help you in your portfolio. All three projects are real-world projects. Along with that, the content is also updated and advanced.

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Other Unique Features of Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Program.

1. Technical Mentor Support

You can’t find this feature on other learning platforms. This is the unique feature of Udacity. They provide a mentor support option where you can directly ask any doubts with your mentor. You can ask about your project’s doubts throughout the Nanodegree Program.

2. Career Service

You will get two additional projects for improving your Linkedin and GitHub profiles. These projects are included in this Nanodegree program. If you are a beginner and don’t have a GitHub profile, this additional Udacity Service will help you.

3. Extra Material for Learning

Udacity also provides some extra courses for learning the prerequisites. When you enroll in the Nanodegree Program, there are some required prerequisites. And Udacity provides separate courses for learning the prerequisites.

Pros of Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree/Advantages

• The concepts are explained very well and from a practical point of view.
• Every lesson is clearly explained and covered how HMM model work and how to use it for part of speech tagging.
• A good amount of programming exercises and Demos to implement the concepts.
• The program has a good balance between theory and projects.
• Complex ideas are explained in such a simple and illustrated way, which is very impressive.
• I like extracurricular content before sessions dealing with RNNs and LSTMs.
• Code Reviews were helpful.
• You will get Technical mentor support and the mentor will guide you from the start of your Nanodegree program until you finish the whole program.
• Udacity provides a great community for help. They have a Stackoverflow-style Q&A forum for people who are stuck with assignments.

Cons of Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree

• The math behind Machine Learning and Deep Learning Algorithms is not covered in detail.
• For clearing small concepts, the Instructor uses lengthy code.
• You have to read some extra material and documentation to understand the code and finish the project.
• The Udacity Nanodegree program is expensive compared to other MOOCs platforms.
• After completing the Nanodegree program, you can’t access the course material. Maybe Udacity does this to avoid misuse.
• Udacity doesn’t have any IOS and android apps. So, you can’t study on your smartphones and outside the house.

Is Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Good for Beginners?

No. Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree is not good for beginners. It is an advanced-level program and requires previous advanced knowledge of Python, Statistics, Probability, and Machine Learning.

Without these skills, you will not understand the concepts covered in the Nanodegree Program. So, if you are a beginner, the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree is not for you.

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Alternative of Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree

Natural Language Processing Specialization by deeplearning.ai is a good alternative to Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree. This program also covers various NLP techniques and teaches how to build tools to translate languages, chatbots, etc.

Comparison between Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree and Natural Language Processing Specialization

Features	Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree	Natural Language Processing Specialization
Rating-	4.5/5	4.6/5
Price-	$750 for 3 months	$97 for 3 months
Time to Complete-	3 months	4 months
Programming language–	Python Programming	Python Programming
No of the Projects Covered	3	1
Number of Courses	3	4
Instructors-	Professional from Top Companies across the Globe.	Instructor of AI at Stanford University and Staff Research Scientist at Google Brain will teach.
Prerequisites-	1. Advanced Python 2. Statistics 3. Probability 4. Machine Learning	1. Intermediate Python 2. Machine Learning 3. Deep Learning Framework (Tensorflow or Keras) 4. Calculus 5. Linear Algebra 6. Statistics
Suitable for-	Intermediate	Intermediate
	Check Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree	Check Natural Language Processing Specialization

So, after considering all the parameters, it’s time to answer-

Is Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Worth It?

Yes, the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree is worth it for those who have intermediate Python, machine learning techniques, and statistics experience. The Udacity NLP Nanodegree is concise and gives equal weightage to theoretical concepts and their practical applications. The covered projects will make your portfolio powerful. They will also provide One-to-One Mentorship to clear your doubts while working on projects.

Check Current Discount on-> Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree

Myth Regarding Udacity

If you are thinking that Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Certificate will help you in getting a job, then you are wrong.

No certificate will help you in getting a job. This is harsh but true. Don’t enroll in this Nanodegree just for the certificate.

Their content and projects will no doubt help you in your Resume and Portfolio. But the certificate is useless. If you learn the concepts and work on projects by yourself without any copy-pasting of the code, then there is a high chance that you will get a job.

That’s all. It’s time to wrap up this Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Review.

Conclusion

I hope this Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Review helped you and cleared your doubts regarding the Udacity Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Program. If you have any doubts or questions, feel free to ask me in the comment section.

All the Best!

Thank YOU!

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