CS 4501

This is definitely the hardest CS class I have taken. The slides are full of complicated mathematical formulas, so I would not recommend this class to the quantitatively challenged. If you don't mind the difficult concepts, then this is a great class because it will teach you the essentials of natural language processing and how search engines work. Prof. Wang really knows what he is talking about because he worked on Bing when he was an intern at Microsoft. The homeworks were extremely helpful and allowed me to understand the lectures better. Tests were quite challenging, but they followed the slides closely. I would recommend this class to anyone interested in NLP; just don't expect to get an A unless you have no life.

I don't think Prof. Wang teaches this class very well. I'm certain the class could be easier if only he explained concepts better. The slides he uses are full of unnecessarily complicated mathematical formulas which detract from their effectiveness. He also has an accent and doesn't speak very loudly making him often difficult to understand/pay attention to. I did learn some interesting concepts from this class but the difficulty combined with poor teaching make me not recommend it unless you have a real passion for language processing and information retrieval.

The other two reviews describe this class very well. Wang makes the material more difficult than it has to be by displaying and attempting to explain the complicated formulas in the slides, while you only need a basic understanding of how they work. He has a strong accent and I noticed a language barrier when I would go to office hours and discuss test questions with him. I would not recommend this class, try a different special topics.

Honestly a solid special topics CS class (Information Retrieval, usually taught by Prof. Wang in the fall). Information retrieval is a really cool topic since we use it everyday, and getting to know the algorithms behind it makes you appreciate search engines much more. Professor Wang's lectures can get a little dry, but you will still learn a lot, and his assignments will reinforce the important topics while not being too difficult to complete (there were 3 assignments; each one was released 2 weeks before the due date, and required around 5 hours of work).