acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

Blogroll


bg-corner

Modeling Queries as Bags of Documents
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...

Documents, Queries, and Categories
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...

Where Do Categories Come From?
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...

Categories are Fundamental for Search
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...

New Report Highlights UA Readiness of Top Websites, Email Tools, Programming Languages and More
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...

Quo Vadis Nunc, Quora?
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...

New EAI Self-Certification Guide Defines Categories for Email Products Based on EAI-Readiness
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,...

Seriously or Literally?
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...

Cold Start, Practical Edition
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...

All Else Equal
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...

Take Searchers Seriously, Not Literally
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...

Hallucinating a Post-Search World
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...

Global Internet Community Encouraged to Submit Event Proposals for UA Day 2025
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)...

Handling Facets With Many Values
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...

Facets, But Which Ones?
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...

Searching for Discovery
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...

Where Do LTR Labels Come From?
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...

How to be a Search Consultant
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...

Search and the Art of Conversation
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...

Is Search Trying Too Hard?
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...
Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account