How to learn fastai function used in the deeplearning topic Fastai NLP course?

Part 1 (2019)
1

I am doing the new fastai-nlp course. https://www.fast.ai/2019/07/08/fastai-nlp/

I have lots of experience doing dl/ml in the industry with keras/tensorflow but I am completely new to Pytorch and fastai library Specifically, I am interested in DL for NLP i.e. lectures starting from 5-nn-imdb.ipynb and not interested in traditional nlp since I know most of them already.

Questions

  1. In the blog, Rachel mentioned students can skip and only attend topics we are intersted in. But when i start with -nn-imdb.ipynb, I dont understand what the fastai functions used in the notebook do like data block API. How do I learn them? Are they taught in the previous lectures of the same course?
  2. How is NLP in this course and NLP in part 1 2019 different? Which one should I learn? I am only interested in NLP and not Image processing for now.
2

Start with the Practical Deep Learning course if you’re lost on the NLP. It’s a wonderful course and gets you very familiar with the fastai library. I believe lecture four is where NLP is. So up til then and you’re golden! :slight_smile:

They both come from the same library, but in the NLP it’s a bit more advanced library use.