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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Search Result Snippets, Revisited
Search result snippets, also known as query-biased summaries, are the additional context included with each result on the search results page. They are an essential...
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Implicit Query Reformulation
Let me start with the disclaimer that this post describes an embryonic idea, not an approach that I have validated through analysis or experimentation. With that...
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Facets: Constraints or Preferences?
When my colleagues and I at Endeca started working on faceted search in 1999, our model of the search journey was that most searchers start with broadly expressed...
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How I Became a Micro-Celebrity
In the 1979 movie “The Jerk”, there is a hilarious scene where Navin (played by Steve Martin) becomes excited at the discovery that his name is in print — in the...
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Affordances for Conversational Search
In application design, affordances are cues that help users discover and explore how to interact with the application. Typical affordances for search applications...
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From Today, Creating Is Dead!
From Today, Creativity Is Dead!A common theme in the concerns about generative AI is that it will replace human-generated art and end creativity as we know it.daguerreotype...
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Trust Through Provenance
The recent advances in generative AI have led many people to fear all manner of deepfakes — particularly text, images, audio, and video. People like Yuval NoahAI...
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The Compressibility of Thought
In a recent Tom Fishburne cartoon, one employee says “AI turns this single bullet point into a long email I can pretend I wrote,” while another says, “AI makesgenerative...
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Welcoming Our New Robot Overserfs
These are early days for generative AI, but it already feels like we are at the dawn of a revolution in human-computer communication. Practically overnight, wefacets...
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Is AI-Generated OK?
For as long as we have had needs, long before servers started asking us “Sorry, we don’t have Coke, is Pepsi ok?”, we have accepted substitutes for the products...
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Maximal Marginal Creativity
In 1998, Jaime Carbonell and Jade Goldstein proposed maximal marginal relevance (MMR) as way to balance the concerns of relevance and diversity. This measure is...
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Minimalist Models for Search Ranking
Search application developers put a lot of effort into optimizing the ranking of search results, especially in areas like ecommerce, where incremental ranking improvements...
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The Ultimate Question
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years of calculation to determine that the answer to the “ultimate question...
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Giving Bard a Coding Interview
Thanks to this post by Behdad Esfahbod, I’ve been reminiscing about an interview problem I used to use at Google and LinkedIn. Google just announced that Bard can...
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Exploring Search Intent as a Duality
Most of us who work on search focus on its engineering or product aspects. But I feel it’s valuable to also look at search philosophically. I’m no expert on philosophy...
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Effective Query Triage
Search evaluation requires a variety of strategies.Evaluating search experiments, such as A/B tests, should focus on the size and direction of their impact.Alerting...
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Helping Searchers Satisfice through Query Understanding
This morning, I had the opportunity to present an invited talk at Walmart’s AI Summit. Not surprisingly, a lot of folks were excited about the potential of ChatGPT...
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A Guest Post from ChatGPT
Since Medium decided to allow AI-generated content as long as it’s clearly disclosed as such, I decided to give it a whirl.Prompt EngineeringMy first prompt was...
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Throwing Needles Into Haystacks
Searching for relevant results has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack. Thankfully, most searchers have it easier than that, since haystacks don’t index...
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