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
The Compressibility of Thought
In a recent Tom Fishburne cartoon, one employee says “AI turns this single bullet point into a long email I can pretend I wrote,” while another says, “AI makesgenerative...
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Welcoming Our New Robot Overserfs
These are early days for generative AI, but it already feels like we are at the dawn of a revolution in human-computer communication. Practically overnight, wefacets...
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Is AI-Generated OK?
For as long as we have had needs, long before servers started asking us “Sorry, we don’t have Coke, is Pepsi ok?”, we have accepted substitutes for the products...
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Maximal Marginal Creativity
In 1998, Jaime Carbonell and Jade Goldstein proposed maximal marginal relevance (MMR) as way to balance the concerns of relevance and diversity. This measure is...
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Minimalist Models for Search Ranking
Search application developers put a lot of effort into optimizing the ranking of search results, especially in areas like ecommerce, where incremental ranking improvements...
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The Ultimate Question
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years of calculation to determine that the answer to the “ultimate question...
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Giving Bard a Coding Interview
Thanks to this post by Behdad Esfahbod, I’ve been reminiscing about an interview problem I used to use at Google and LinkedIn. Google just announced that Bard can...
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Exploring Search Intent as a Duality
Most of us who work on search focus on its engineering or product aspects. But I feel it’s valuable to also look at search philosophically. I’m no expert on philosophy...
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Effective Query Triage
Search evaluation requires a variety of strategies.Evaluating search experiments, such as A/B tests, should focus on the size and direction of their impact.Alerting...
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Helping Searchers Satisfice through Query Understanding
This morning, I had the opportunity to present an invited talk at Walmart’s AI Summit. Not surprisingly, a lot of folks were excited about the potential of ChatGPT...
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A Guest Post from ChatGPT
Since Medium decided to allow AI-generated content as long as it’s clearly disclosed as such, I decided to give it a whirl.Prompt EngineeringMy first prompt was...
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Throwing Needles Into Haystacks
Searching for relevant results has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack. Thankfully, most searchers have it easier than that, since haystacks don’t index...
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Upcoming Search Classes
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope 2023 is off to a great start for you.Are you excited to kick off the new year by learning more about search?If so, you’re in luck...
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Is The Valley Getting Cannier?
In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the phrase “uncanny valley” (不気味の谷 in the original Japanese) to denote the phenomenon that when a machine seems close-but...
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Attention, Expertise, Trust
I’m old enough to remember when the web was new, and honest enough to admit that I was a skeptic at the time. Fortunately, I was wrong, and I owe my career to the...
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What is Not Search?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Search is unquestionably my hammer, so it’s easy for me to frame everything as a search problem. After...
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Let’s Talk About Resume Screening
With apologies to Bruno, we don’t talk about resume screening. But we should.Resume screening is usually the first step in the hiring process for active candidates...
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Technical Interviewing: Be Better
Technical interviewing is hard, but that’s no excuse for it to be so terrible. Since candidates generally don’t have much leverage to negotiate the interview process...
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Query Similarity
I started writing about query understanding in 2016, working my way up from low-level concerns like language identification and character normalization to higher...
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