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
How to be a Search Consultant
If you have thought about hiring a search consultant or working as one, you may have asked yourself what exactly search consultants do. This post offers an opinionated...
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Sparse and Dense Representations
The heart of the AI-powered search revolution is the move from sparse bag-of-words representations to dense embedding-based representations. But reducing everything...
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AI-Powered Search: Embedding-Based Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
When search application developers consider replacing a traditional search architecture with AI-powered search, they usually have two things in mind. The firstbag...
From The Noisy Channel
Analyzing the AI Search Opportunity
In the past several years, AI has disrupted every part of the technology industry. Search applications are no exception: it is not a question of whether to useinverted...
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Learn to Rank = Learn to be Humble
As a search consultant, I work with lots of organizations that strive to improve their search applications. I tend to emphasize query understanding and contentlearning...
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Hierarchy is Hard!
A fundamental concept in language understanding is that of semantic hierarchy. In linguistics, a hyponym is a more specific or subordinate word, while a hypernym...
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An Update on Search Classes
In 2022, Grant Ingersoll and I launched our first four-week Search with Machine Learning class on Uplimit, then called Corise. I still have a special place in my...
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Making Sense of Null and Low Results
With rare exception, searchers are unhappy when a search query returns zero results. Businesses — especially ecommerce businesses trying to sell products to searchers...
From The Noisy Channel
Precision, Recall, and Desirability
Recent developments in AI have created opportunities across the search stack. But before building solutions, it is important to clearly identify the problems they...
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
UASG Publishes 2023 Universal Acceptance Activities Report
By the UASG 2023 was a milestone year for Universal Acceptance (UA). From local awareness and training sessions around the world to the inaugural UA Day, global...
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
UASG Announces Shortlisted Events for UA Day 2024
The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) has published the shortlisted events for the second annual Universal Acceptance (UA) Day, which will be held from...
From The Noisy Channel