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
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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...
From The Noisy Channel