Archive for December, 2008

Composing Inverse Functions to Measure Model Fitness

Friday, December 5th, 2008

This articles concerns a method for evaluating the fitness of content topic models and document topic models based on the dissonance between a set of documents and the set of documents generated by composing inverse functions and applying them to the original set of documents. A document generating function is applied to a topic generating function that is applied to the original set of documents. In order to compare topics, one can look at the original set of topics compared to set of topics generated by apply a topic generating function to the documents generated by applying a document generating function to the original set of topics.

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Google’s SearchWiki as a step towards more user control

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Google recently released their new SearchWiki feature which allows users, who are logged into a Google account, to rearrange search results (by clicking on arrows that move them up or down one slot), remove results from the returned list, and comment on results (all comments are made public). More information is in this Google blog article.

It’s encouraging to see Google taking user responses into account. It has always been our opinion that this is something sadly missing from the mainstream search world. Google also states that the results’ movements, removals, and comments will not be used as input to their search algorithms. Well, at least not yet.

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