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...
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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...
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...12