Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From The Noisy Channel
Search and the Art of Conversation
What is the job of a search application? A common answer is that it needs to return the best results for a query, sorted in relevance order. While this answer sounds...
From The Noisy Channel
Is Search Trying Too Hard?
Last year, the emergence of ChatGPT and its ability to generate volumes from short prompts led me to speculate about the compressibility of thought. In a related...
From The Noisy Channel
Is Similarity Objective?
Some search problems have binary answers. We often frame these problems in terms of matching or equivalence. A simplistic formulation of relevance is that a canonicalized...
From The Noisy Channel
Bags of Documents and the Cluster Hypothesis
My writing on AI-powered search promotes the “bag-of-documents” model, which represents a search query as a distribution of vectors for relevant documents. When...
From The Noisy Channel
Bags of Queries as Sparse Document Representations
There is a duality between search queries and indexed documents: we can model a query as a bag of documents and a document as a bag of queries. This duality offers...
From The Noisy Channel
Is Targeted Advertising Ethical
Is Targeted Advertising Ethical?Targeted advertising is a huge industry with a massive branding problem. On one hand, nearly all of the “free” digital productspromoted...
From The Noisy Channel
Is Targeting Advertising Ethical?
Is Targeted Advertising Ethical?Targeted advertising is a huge industry with a massive branding problem. On one hand, nearly all of the “free” digital productspromoted...
From The Noisy Channel
Ranking vs. Relevance: 2 Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
A crucial distinction for search applications is the difference between ranking and relevance. In this post, I explain what happens when search applications fail...12