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
Content Understanding
This publication is a series of posts devoted to content understanding. Each post is self-contained, but there is a natural progression. If you’d like to read them...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Moderation
Many platforms, particularly social media sites and ecommerce marketplaces, establish policies to determine what they consider acceptable content. These platforms...
From The Noisy Channel
Similarity-Sensitive Diversity
In my work on search engines and recommender systems, I’ve thought a lot about entropy and diversity. I named my first blog, The Noisy Channel, after a seminalClaude...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Quality
Despite its importance, content quality is hard to define without devolving into circularity. What we mean by content quality is a measure or collection of measures...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Structure
One of the challenges facing search applications is that users aren’t necessarily searching for documents. To put it another way, the unit of content that a user...
From The Noisy Channel
Search is Fundamental
Search engines are at the heart of the digital world. We interact with them on the outside, using search engines to find information, products, and more. But they...
From The Noisy Channel
Search: Teaching the Fundamentals
Earlier this year, Grant Ingersoll and I kicked off a 4-week co:rise course on Search with Machine Learning. We covered search fundamentals, and then went on to...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Similarity
Content classification and annotation offer useful approaches for content understanding, recognizing whether a piece of content is about a particular topic or mentions...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Annotation
Content understanding requires both holistic and reductionist approaches, just like query understanding. The previous post focused on content classification asentity...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Classification
The most fundamental form of holistic content understanding is classification. Content classification maps a piece of content — that is, an entry in the searchtaxonomy...
From The Noisy Channel
What is Content Understanding?
There’s a lot of writing about search — especially about ranking and relevance. And recently there’s been an increased focus on the particular challenges of query...
From The Noisy Channel
Thoughts on Search Result Diversity
Regular readers know that search is about much more than ranking. If you’re new here, you might want to read this post about ranking vs. relevance.But a topic I...
From The Noisy Channel
Balance Your Search Budget!
Search can be computationally intensive. Indeed, search has been the driving force behind many advances in computational efficiency, from MapReduce for distributed...
From The Noisy Channel
On Search Leadership
As a high-class consultant, I don’t just talk to companies about the technical aspects of search. I also help them them address organizational challenges.For example...
From The Noisy Channel
The Free Advice Club
The first rule of the Free Advice Club is: you talk about the Free Advice Club! Not like that other club.But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve had an extremelyMedium...
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Using AI to Understand Search Intent
Several weeks ago, I wrote a post advocating the use of AI for query understanding. I argued that holistic query understanding with embeddings and deep learning...
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The Eternal Quest for Meaning
In 1668, John Wilkins published An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. In it, he proposed a universal language that would represent every...
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Ranking vs. Relevance
Most folks who work on search worry about relevance. But it’s surprisingly difficult to find a useful definition of relevance.Defining RelevanceMerriam-Webster ...
From The Noisy Channel
Putting Search Ranking in Perspective
For feeds and recommendations, ranking is critical. All the inputs are implicit, so machine-learned ranking is the only practical way to optimize engagement.Search...
From The Noisy Channel