A free, hands-on course from Hugging Face on natural language processing with transformer models, built around their Transformers library and Python. It covers using pretrained models for tasks like text classification, question answering and text generation.

Commenters call it a very good, hands-on starting point for NLP and transformer models, and suggest it as the place to start among Hugging Face's courses.

What commenters said (4)

1. Recommendsloudmax2023

   I recommend the Huggingface courses: https://huggingface.co/course

   The courses are geared toward writing Python applications around these models. They're fairly hands on, so it would still be a good thing to complement them by reading papers or watching videos on fundamental principles of AI and ML.

2. Recommendsloudmax2023in “Ask HN: How to Break into AI Engineering”

   Check out the Huggingface NLP course: https://huggingface.co/learn/nlp-course/chapter1/1

   Huggingface has a bunch of courses, but that's a good one to start with. You can do the exercises on your own computer or on a cloud server if you want access to a more powerful GPU. If you go through these courses and pay attention you'll be in a really good position.

3. Recommendsjamesbriggs2021in “Show HN: I made a free course, 'NLP for Semantic Search'”

   The HuggingFace course is very good for NLP: https://huggingface.co/course/chapter1/1

4. Recommendsjamesbriggs2021in “Show HN: I made a free course, 'NLP for Semantic Search'”

   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 I think much of it can be followed without too much prerequisite knowledge.

   That being said, as a writer it sounds like you'd be most interested in generative models that generate new text, we do cover that a little in the Question Answering chapter, but otherwise, not so much. Although I don't know your ideas or plans so I can't say for sure what is good/bad for you to focus on.

   I do think you should read into transformer models like BERT and GPT, there is a very good free course from HuggingFace who are the 'de-facto framework' for NLP at the moment, that could be useful for you too: https://huggingface.co/course/chapter1/1 (chapter one will introduce everything too, definitely go through that)

   With HuggingFace, you can put together a simple T5 or GPT-2 text generation script with a few lines of code

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