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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Geographical Context
Location often provides a strong signal of searcher intent. Sometimes location acts as an implicit part of the search query, such as when people are searching for...
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To Build Better Search, Develop Empathy With Your Users
User experience designers recognize the importance of empathy in the design process. Understanding how and why users engage with products yields insights that help...
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Session Context
The most immediate context for a search query is a search session, a sequence of activities the searcher performs in order to pursue an information-seeking task...
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Why Voice isn’t Selling…Yet
Originally published in VentureBeat.Personal digital assistants have taken the world by storm. We have Siri and Google Assistant on our phones, and many of us have...
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Evaluating Search: Using Human Judgement
Originally posted on the Twiggle blog.In the previous post, we looked at measuring searcher behavior in order to evaluate search engine performance. Measuring searcher...
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Evaluating Search: Measuring Searcher Behavior
Originally posted on the Twiggle blog.Measuring the effectiveness of your search engine is hard. Fortunately, you have an army of volunteers helping you: your customers...
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Evaluating Good Search (Part I): Measure It
Originally posted on the Twiggle blog.At Twiggle, we’re all about improving the search experience. But how do we define improvement? As Lord Kelvin, one of history...
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Contextual Query Understanding
So far, we’ve focused on understanding searchers based entirely on the words they type into the search box. But search doesn’t occur in a vacuum. In the next posts...
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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Machine Learning
As someone who often finds himself explaining machine learning to non-experts, I offer the following list as a public service announcement. Machine learning means...
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Autocomplete and User Experience
The previous post focused on how to determine the best autocomplete suggestions based on query probability and query performance. In this post, we’ll dive intoscope...
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You’re absolutely right about the number of suggestions, of course.
You’re absolutely right about the number of suggestions, of course. And it’s a good reminder that autocomplete user experience deserves its own post, which I promise...
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Autocomplete
In the past decade, autocomplete has become a required feature for search engines. Today, searchers who type into a search box expect to see autocomplete suggestions...
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I agree with the judge about the balance of hardships, but that in itself wouldn’t have been…
I agree with the judge about the balance of hardships, but that in itself wouldn’t have been sufficient to grant the injunction. The judge also ruled that “hiQ...
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On hiQ v. LinkedIn
On August 14th, US District Judge Edward M. Chen granted a preliminary injunction to hiQ Labs in its case against LinkedIn. While I agree with part of the judge...
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Here are a couple of relevant papers:
Here are a couple of relevant papers: Scaling Semantic Parsers with On-the-Fly Ontology Matching Ontology-Based Translation of Natural Language Queries to SPARQL...
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Taxonomies and Ontologies
In order to understand queries, it’s important to ground that understanding in a knowledge base. Two common ways to represent a knowledge base are taxonomies and...
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Prithiviraj, thanks for the kind words.
Prithiviraj, thanks for the kind words. As for NER systems for English text only recognizing named entities in title case, that’s usually a function of how they...
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Entity Recognition
In the previous post on query scoping, we discussed query tagging as a special case of named-entity recognition (NER). In this post, we’ll dive a little bit deeper...
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