Comments on: Proximity is a hack

By: Interesting, Cool & Useful - Sep 12 - Dave Naffziger’s Blog

Interesting, Cool & Useful - Sep 12 - Dave Naffziger’s Blog — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:00:53 +0000

[...] Proximity is a Hack. Tim Converse, formerly of Yahoo Search and now at Powerset, offers a great writeup about the limits of keyword proximity in determining relevance. [...]

By: Negative SEO blog : SEOassassin » “Natural language processing” my natural black ass…

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:07:26 +0000

[...] Tim has a thought-provoking post about proximity and it’s uses and limitations, “Proximity is a hack“. I’ll let you read it youself, as it is quite long, but it’s well worth [...]

By: Tim Wintle

Tim Wintle — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 15:21:54 +0000

Have to say this is a theme I have heard coming from multiple sources recently, about moving away from pure vector based semantics.

I certainly do not agree with saying that we have squeezed as much as we can out of vector models, although possibly out of pure linear spaces.

I definately agree with the idea of doing further linguistic work to the text first, though, and I thoroughly enjoyed this article. I think the emphasis has to go on combining something along the lines of neural networks with the existing vector models, where many people I have heard talking about this recently have suggested completely removing the vector approach – which seems to be throwing away years of work.

By: brendan

brendan — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 03:56:45 +0000

epicycles to epicycles — I like it!

By: randfish

randfish — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:27:30 +0000

Tim – so, if I understand you correctly, the idea here is to have the machines actually “understand” context and then use it to make better correlations between term proximity, link relationships, etc, yeah?

Thus, what you’d really have is something close to natural language processing, right?

Gotta say – if Powerset can do it before Google does, there’s going to be a lot of very impressed people out there, myself among them.

BTW – Congrats on the move and the position. Haven’t seen you since Chicago, but hopefully you’ll emerge from coding for San Jose