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
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...
From The Noisy Channel
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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Sparse and Dense Representations
The heart of the AI-powered search revolution is the move from sparse bag-of-words representations to dense embedding-based representations. But reducing everything...
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AI-Powered Search: Embedding-Based Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
When search application developers consider replacing a traditional search architecture with AI-powered search, they usually have two things in mind. The firstbag...
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Analyzing the AI Search Opportunity
In the past several years, AI has disrupted every part of the technology industry. Search applications are no exception: it is not a question of whether to useinverted...
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Learn to Rank = Learn to be Humble
As a search consultant, I work with lots of organizations that strive to improve their search applications. I tend to emphasize query understanding and contentlearning...
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Hierarchy is Hard!
A fundamental concept in language understanding is that of semantic hierarchy. In linguistics, a hyponym is a more specific or subordinate word, while a hypernym...
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An Update on Search Classes
In 2022, Grant Ingersoll and I launched our first four-week Search with Machine Learning class on Uplimit, then called Corise. I still have a special place in my...
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Making Sense of Null and Low Results
With rare exception, searchers are unhappy when a search query returns zero results. Businesses — especially ecommerce businesses trying to sell products to searchers...
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Precision, Recall, and Desirability
Recent developments in AI have created opportunities across the search stack. But before building solutions, it is important to clearly identify the problems they...12