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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Quo Vadis Nunc, Quora?
I was one of Quora’s earliest users, earned Top Writer status for a few years, and topped the leaderboard as a 9-time Knowledge Prize Winner. One of my answerswhere...
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Seriously or Literally?
The other day, I posted about the need for search applications to take searchers seriously, not literally. This need holds even when searchers practically ask to...
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Cold Start, Practical Edition
If you are a search application developer or some other kind of machine learning practitioner, you have probably encountered a cold start problem: launching a data...
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All Else Equal
In The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin describes how an alien species drives scientists to suicide by making it impossible for them to produce consistent experimental...
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Take Searchers Seriously, Not Literally
Search application developers manage numerous tradeoffs, foremost the tradeoff between precision and recall. Precision measures the fraction of search results that...
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Hallucinating a Post-Search World
When I first heard about 3D printing, I imagined something like a Star Trek replicator that could synthesize arbitrary objects — or at least meals — on demand.generative...
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Handling Facets With Many Values
The previous post addresses the challenge of selecting which facets a search application should present to searchers as query refinements. However, there is another...
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Facets, But Which Ones?
This post dives into a particular challenge of faceted search, exploring the challenge of selecting which facets a search application should present to searchers...
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Searching for Discovery
Search and DiscoveryIf search has one job, it is to help searchers find what they are looking for. However, many search application developers feel that searchHippocratic...
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Where Do LTR Labels Come From?
The most common goal that my search clients express is a desire to improve their ranking. I always start by managing their expectations and helping them understand...
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How to be a Search Consultant
If you have thought about hiring a search consultant or working as one, you may have asked yourself what exactly search consultants do. This post offers an opinionated...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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