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
Precision, Recall, and Desirability: A Deep Dive
This post expands on my previous discussion of “Precision, Recall, and Desirability,” diving deeper into defining, motivating, measuring, identifying, and addressing...
From The Noisy Channel
ChatGPT, Are You Just Telling Me What I Want to Hear?
These days, the Turing Test — which Turing originally called the “imitation game” — feels hopelessly outdated. With deepfakes and AI-generated content becomingLLM...
From The Noisy Channel
Not All Recall is Created Equal
Search application developers constantly navigate tradeoffs, particularly between precision and recall. Precision measures the fraction of retrieved results that...
From The Noisy Channel
To Bot or Not to Bot: It Depends on the Question
I was one of Quora’s earliest users. I earned Top Writer status for several years and even made some money through their Knowledge Prizes. Although I stopped contributing...
From The Noisy Channel
Ground Truth: A Useful Fiction
A key concern about AI is that models “hallucinate” — technical jargon for saying that they make up things that look right. Keeping AI models grounded in truthimplicit...
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
2024 in Review: Milestones in Universal Acceptance Progress
Authors: Anil Kumar Jain, Chair, Universal Acceptance Steering Group Sarmad Hussain, Senior Director, IDN and UA Programs, ICANN As 2024 draws to a close, it is...
From The Noisy Channel
Modeling Queries as Bags of Documents
Last week, I had the honor of presenting “Modeling Queries as Bags of Documents” at Search Solutions 2024 with Aritra Mandal.We introduced the bag-of-documentshow...
From The Noisy Channel
Documents, Queries, and Categories
I have published a number of posts and presentations about the bag-of-documents model, which essentially represents query intent as a distribution in a document...
From The Noisy Channel
Where Do Categories Come From?
In my previous post, I argued that categories are fundamental for search applications. I characterized a robust set of categories as offering coverage, coherence...
From The Noisy Channel
Categories are Fundamental for Search
As a search consultant, I have learned to be flexible about structured data. However, I do insist on content being classified into categories.What are categories...
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
New Report Highlights UA Readiness of Top Websites, Email Tools, Programming Languages and More
Authors: Seda Akbulut, UA Program Manager; Sarmad Hussain, ICANN IDN/UA Programs Director; For nearly a decade, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names andNew...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
New EAI Self-Certification Guide Defines Categories for Email Products Based on EAI-Readiness
By Mark Svancarek, Chair, UA EAI Working Group The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) has published a new guide to help email service or tool providers,...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
Global Internet Community Encouraged to Submit Event Proposals for UA Day 2025
Event proposals are now being accepted for the third annual Universal Acceptance (UA) Day, to be held on or around 28 March 2025 (between 1 March and 30 May 2025)...
From The Noisy Channel
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...12