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
AI for Query Understanding
In the past decade, the incredible progress in word embeddings and deep learning has fueled an interest in neural information retrieval. An increasing number of...
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Query Understanding
This publication is a series of posts devoted to query understanding. Each post is self-contained, but there is a natural progression. If you’d like to read them...
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Recall: Size Isn’t Everything
Recall is a key measure of search quality that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. But how does a search engine recognize when recall is a problem?Size...
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The 3 Rs of Search: Relevance, Recall, and Ranking
In grade school, we were taught the three Rs: reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. In search, we can be thankful that the three Rs actually start with the letter R...
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In Search of Recall
Search developers tend to focus most of their efforts on the first page of results. As a result, they prioritize investment in ranking models, with the goal ofprecision...
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Putting Users Back In Control
Francis Fukuyama, Barak Richman, and Ashish Goel recently published a piece in Foreign Affairs, which they ambitiously titled “How to Save Democracy From Technology...
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Facets of Faceted Search
Faceted search is a fascinating topic. It’s a standard feature of site search, and one could write an entire book on the subject. In this post, I’ll focus on some...
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Expanding on Explore-Exploit
A few years ago, I proposed a non-adversarial ad-supported model: an explore-exploit model, applicable to search engines and feeds, that aligns the interests of...
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Wolf, thank you for these additional points.
Wolf, thank you for these additional points. I agree that Peter Norvig’s post, while very educational, is a starting point to learn about spelling correction but...
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Coffee, Coffee, Coffee!
In 1984, Robin Williams starred in Moscow on the Hudson as a Russian saxophonist who decides to defect from the USSR during a shopping trip to a New York department...
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Learning from Friction to Improve the Search Experience
When we design search applications, we aspire to make the user experience frictionless. A search engine should “just work”, enabling searchers to easily express...
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Thanks. And sorry that slide was cryptically brief.
Thanks. And sorry that slide was cryptically brief. What I mean is that spelling correction should not restrict itself to correcting each token separately. Many...
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In this case, I’m imagining that the only match of the string “black” against one of the attributes…
In this case, I’m imagining that the only match of the string “black” against one of the attributes is for the “color” attribute. If the string matches multiple...
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The typical integration approach I’ve seen is to use a separate query rewriting service that then…
The typical integration approach I’ve seen is to use a separate query rewriting service that then either filter the Solr query to the preferred categories / attributes...
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If the results for two queries expressing the same intent are similar, then they should map to…
If the results for two queries expressing the same intent are similar, then they should map to similar vectors. If not, then it’s more complicated. You might still...
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Indeed, the devil is in the details, But I can tell you that I’ve successfully used this idea to…
Indeed, the devil is in the details, But I can tell you that I’ve successfully used this idea to drive lift for my clients, and I recommend exploring it.
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As I suggested in the post, you can use the embeddings of result titles for the results searchers…
As I suggested in the post, you can use the embeddings of result titles for the results searchers engage with when they perform the query. I realize that the devil...
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I’ve written a few posts that at least touch on voice interfaces:
I’ve written a few posts that at least touch on voice interfaces: Query Understanding and Voice Interfaces Why Voice isn’t Selling…Yet Query Understanding and Chatbots...
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Search Queries and Search Intent
Mapping Search Queries To Search IntentsEvaluating and improving search experience starts with analyzing the queries searchers are making. But search queries are...
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