Solved – Neural network references (textbooks, online courses) for beginners

Question

I want to learn Neural Networks. I am a Computational Linguist. I know statistical machine learning approaches and can code in Python.

I am looking to start with its concepts, and know one or two popular models which may be useful from a Computational Linguistics perspective.

I browsed the web for reference and found a few books and materials.

• Ripley, Brian D. (1996) Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks, Cambridge

• Bishop, C.M. (1995) Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• some links, like this thesis, these course notes (University of Toronto Psychology Department), these course notes (University of Wisconsin Computer Science) and this slideshow (Facebook Research).

Coursera courses are generally nice, if anyone knows anything relevant from them. I prefer materials with lucid language and ample examples.

Answer 1

You're in luck! There are an amazing number of resources available at the moment. In particular, you could look at:

• a Coursera course starting soon
• a recently published online textbook by some of the leaders in the field (Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville)
• these lecture notes, and this overview, which are more oriented towards natural language processing
• a set of blog posts with beautiful visualizations by Chris Olah
• two well-supported toolkits with python interfaces and online tutorials: Tensorflow and Theano