I’m glad you’re interested in NLP! Both CS187 and CS287 are offered this semester (Fall 2021). You do not need prior NLP experience for either class. Our classes mostly only overlap by covering some of the same neural net architectures, but otherwise there’s a huge difference.
CS187:
- is a more gentle introduction than CS287
- has ~6 lectures
- is lab-heavy
- focuses more on linguistics (e.g., parsing)
- 2nd time the course has been offered
CS287:
- assumes you’ve taken a Machine Learning course
- covers more advanced topics than CS187
- has 21 lectures and no labs
- is research-heavy
- focuses more on NLP tasks
- 1st time the course has been offered
In the following spreadsheet, I detail the course differences. Within the Course Topics section, the green blocks denote that the given topic is covered in the respective course.
To assess if you have the necessary background to take CS287, please complete HW #0 (ungraded).