NLP for Semantic Search

Learning and science

online course

SHOW HN2021

239points
29comments
#166of 2,533 in 2021
Top 7%of 2021 by points

How HN took it

LovedMost comments that take a side are positive

5 positive, 13 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 0 critical, out of 19 comments about the project. Thread score +0.28.

Docs: 1 for, 0 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Informative, polished and useful for learning NLP

    From 3 comments
    • Looks really informative and polished!
      SleekEagle on HN
    • I am browsing the web in search for NLP resources as I consider a pivot into this new area (I already have a few years in data science and image processing) and finding this post…
      nbeleski on HN
    • Bless you for sharing this knowledge.
      NetOpWibby on HN

Objections

  • Semantic search is less useful than literal keyword search for known terms

    From 3 comments
    • I very much appreciate the course you shared. But I want to mention for everyone taking it: please also keep in mind "dumb" logical operators like OR, AND, NOT, and quotes that…
      danuker on HN
    • This was my thought exactly. I absolutely loathe semantic search and have never found it more useful than literal search.
      smt88 on HN
    • It most often results in being unable to find something I know exact keywords for. I have used search long enough to remember having only literal search, and I never had an issue…
      smt88 on HN

Requests

  • Support for longer documents beyond transformer token limits

    From 1 comment
    • Does this semantic search work for longer documents? I know BERT&Co models are limited to around 500-1000 tokens.
      rolisz on HN

Questions

  • How does the course relate to vector search approaches

    From 1 comment
    • Looks very good, thanks for sharing! How does your course relate to the vector search approach discussed here?…
      rmbyrro on HN
  • What prerequisites are needed

    From 1 comment
    • What skills would you say are nessecary prerequisites for understanding this material? I'm a writer, and in the past I have had success making poems and shit via messing around…
      notjulianjaynes on HN

Alternatives named

  • HuggingFace NLP course

    From 2 comments
    • Ideally I think it's useful to be familiar with Python and some NLP. Parts of the course can get reasonably in-depth, but we have tried to simplify every as much as possible and…
      jamesbriggs on HN
    • The HuggingFace course is very good for NLP: https://huggingface.co/course/chapter1/1
      jamesbriggs on HN
  • Google Vector Search

    From 1 comment
    • Looks very good, thanks for sharing! How does your course relate to the vector search approach discussed here?…
      rmbyrro on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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