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 …
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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...
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Content Annotation
Content understanding requires both holistic and reductionist approaches, just like query understanding. The previous post focused on content classification asentity...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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New Choice
In improv, there’s a fun game called “new choice”. At any point during the improvised scene, the host can call for a “new choice”. The player who last spoke has...
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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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