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
Is The Valley Getting Cannier?
In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the phrase “uncanny valley” (不気味の谷 in the original Japanese) to denote the phenomenon that when a machine seems close-but...
From The Noisy Channel
Attention, Expertise, Trust
I’m old enough to remember when the web was new, and honest enough to admit that I was a skeptic at the time. Fortunately, I was wrong, and I owe my career to the...
From The Noisy Channel
What is Not Search?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Search is unquestionably my hammer, so it’s easy for me to frame everything as a search problem. After...
From The Noisy Channel
Let’s Talk About Resume Screening
With apologies to Bruno, we don’t talk about resume screening. But we should.Resume screening is usually the first step in the hiring process for active candidates...
From The Noisy Channel
Technical Interviewing: Be Better
Technical interviewing is hard, but that’s no excuse for it to be so terrible. Since candidates generally don’t have much leverage to negotiate the interview process...
From The Noisy Channel
Query Similarity
I started writing about query understanding in 2016, working my way up from low-level concerns like language identification and character normalization to higher...
From The Noisy Channel
Information Extraction
When we index content for search, it’s natural to think in terms of documents. But searchers aren’t necessarily looking for documents. They’re looking for information...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Understanding
This publication is a series of posts devoted to content understanding. Each post is self-contained, but there is a natural progression. If you’d like to read them...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Moderation
Many platforms, particularly social media sites and ecommerce marketplaces, establish policies to determine what they consider acceptable content. These platforms...
From The Noisy Channel
Similarity-Sensitive Diversity
In my work on search engines and recommender systems, I’ve thought a lot about entropy and diversity. I named my first blog, The Noisy Channel, after a seminalClaude...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Quality
Despite its importance, content quality is hard to define without devolving into circularity. What we mean by content quality is a measure or collection of measures...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Structure
One of the challenges facing search applications is that users aren’t necessarily searching for documents. To put it another way, the unit of content that a user...
From The Noisy Channel
Search is Fundamental
Search engines are at the heart of the digital world. We interact with them on the outside, using search engines to find information, products, and more. But they...
From The Noisy Channel
Search: Teaching the Fundamentals
Earlier this year, Grant Ingersoll and I kicked off a 4-week co:rise course on Search with Machine Learning. We covered search fundamentals, and then went on to...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
Content Annotation
Content understanding requires both holistic and reductionist approaches, just like query understanding. The previous post focused on content classification asentity...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel