Brave Browser has replaced Google with its own no-tracking privacy-centric Brave Search as the default search engine for new users in five regions. Brave is an open-source Chromium-based browser that focuses on user privacy by automatically blocking ads and tracking scripts and removing the privacy-invasive functions built into Chromium. Historically, Brave used Google as its default search engine when searching from the address bar. However, Google is known for tracking users' activities, behavior, and interests, not making it a good fit for a privacy-centric browser. Today, Brave announced that their privacy-focused Brave Search has now become the default search engine for new users in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Brave is very confident in its privacy-centric search engine -- so much so that it's giving Google the boot. As of today (October 19th), Brave will use the engine as its browser's default search tool, replacing Google in the US, UK and Canada. Your browser will keep its existing search engine settings, and you can always pick Google or another competitor if you're so inclined. The change in defaults is available across desktop releases as well as Android and iOS. Brave Search is effectively billed as the anti-Google engine.

Health care professionals rely on treatment search engines to efficiently find adequate clinical trials and early access programs for their patients. However, doctors lose trust in the system if its underlying processes are unclear and unexplained. In this paper, a model-agnostic explainable method is developed to provide users with further information regarding the reasons why a clinical trial is retrieved in response to a query. To accomplish this, the engine generates features from clinical trials using by using a knowledge graph, clinical trial data and additional medical resources. and a crowd-sourcing methodology is used to determine their importance. Grounded on the proposed methodology, the rationale behind retrieving the clinical trials is explained in layman's terms so that healthcare processionals can effortlessly perceive them. In addition, we compute an explainability score for each of the retrieved items, according to which the items can be ranked. The experiments validated by medical professionals suggest that the proposed methodology induces trust in targeted as well as in non-targeted users, and provide them with reliable explanations and ranking of retrieved items.

Smart healthcare has achieved significant progress in recent years. Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies enable various smart applications across various healthcare scenarios. As an essential technology powered by AI, natural language processing (NLP) plays a key role in smart healthcare due to its capability of analysing and understanding human language. In this work we review existing studies that concern NLP for smart healthcare from the perspectives of technique and application. We focus on feature extraction and modelling for various NLP tasks encountered in smart healthcare from a technical point of view. In the context of smart healthcare applications employing NLP techniques, the elaboration largely attends to representative smart healthcare scenarios, including clinical practice, hospital management, personal care, public health, and drug development. We further discuss the limitations of current works and identify the directions for future works.

Search Engines is a software system that helps to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified by users, such as a list of web sites, news stories, a map, a directory listing or a biography of a celebrity. They are web search engines that search using a spider to systematically index the content of web sites. The term "search engine" can be used for the software system, the service that delivers web content, or both. In recent years, search engine optimization (SEO) has become a very popular way for web site owners to attract more traffic to their web sites.

Search systems control the exposure of ranked content to searchers. In many cases, creators value not only the exposure of their content but, moreover, an understanding of the specific searches where the content is surfaced. The problem of identifying which queries expose a given piece of content in the ranking results is an important and relatively under-explored search transparency challenge. Exposing queries are useful for quantifying various issues of search bias, privacy, data protection, security, and search engine optimization. Exact identification of exposing queries in a given system is computationally expensive, especially in dynamic contexts such as web search. In quest of a more lightweight solution, we explore the feasibility of approximate exposing query identification (EQI) as a retrieval task by reversing the role of queries and documents in two classes of search systems: dense dual-encoder models and traditional BM25 models. We then propose how this approach can be improved through metric learning over the retrieval embedding space. We further derive an evaluation metric to measure the quality of a ranking of exposing queries, as well as conducting an empirical analysis focusing on various practical aspects of approximate EQI.

Contemporary natural language processing (NLP) revolves around learning from latent document representations, generated either implicitly by neural language models or explicitly by methods such as doc2vec or similar. One of the key properties of the obtained representations is their dimension. Whilst the commonly adopted dimensions of 256 and 768 offer sufficient performance on many tasks, it is many times unclear whether the default dimension is the most suitable choice for the subsequent downstream learning tasks. Furthermore, representation dimensions are seldom subject to hyperparameter tuning due to computational constraints. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that a surprisingly simple and efficient recursive compression procedure can be sufficient to both significantly compress the initial representation, but also potentially improve its performance when considering the task of text classification. Having smaller and less noisy representations is the desired property during deployment, as orders of magnitude smaller models can significantly reduce the computational overload and with it the deployment costs. We propose CoRe, a straightforward, representation learner-agnostic framework suitable for representation compression. The CoRe's performance is showcased and studied on a collection of 17 real-life corpora from biomedical, news, social media, and literary domains. We explored CoRe's behavior when considering contextual and non-contextual document representations, different compression levels, and 9 different compression algorithms. Current results based on more than 100,000 compression experiments indicate that recursive Singular Value Decomposition offers a very good trade-off between the compression efficiency and performance, making CoRe useful in many existing, representation-dependent NLP pipelines.

The essential task of Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) is to organize a collection of news media into clusters of stories that pertain to the same real-world event. To apply TDT models to practical applications such as search engines and discovery tools, human guidance is needed to pin down the scope of an "event" for the corpus of interest. In this work in progress, we explore a human-in-the-loop method that helps users iteratively fine-tune TDT algorithms so that both the algorithms and the users themselves better understand the nature of the events. We generate a visual overview of the entire corpus, allowing the user to select regions of interest from the overview, and then ask a series of questions to affirm (or reject) that the selected documents belong to the same event. The answers to these questions supplement the training data for the event similarity model that underlies the system.

Entity Alignment (EA) aims to match equivalent entities across different Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and is an essential step of KG fusion. Current mainstream methods -- neural EA models -- rely on training with seed alignment, i.e., a set of pre-aligned entity pairs which are very costly to annotate. In this paper, we devise a novel Active Learning (AL) framework for neural EA, aiming to create highly informative seed alignment to obtain more effective EA models with less annotation cost. Our framework tackles two main challenges encountered when applying AL to EA: (1) How to exploit dependencies between entities within the AL strategy. Most AL strategies assume that the data instances to sample are independent and identically distributed. However, entities in KGs are related. To address this challenge, we propose a structure-aware uncertainty sampling strategy that can measure the uncertainty of each entity as well as its impact on its neighbour entities in the KG. (2) How to recognise entities that appear in one KG but not in the other KG (i.e., bachelors). Identifying bachelors would likely save annotation budget. To address this challenge, we devise a bachelor recognizer paying attention to alleviate the effect of sampling bias. Empirical results show that our proposed AL strategy can significantly improve sampling quality with good generality across different datasets, EA models and amount of bachelors.

Google is developing a new feature called Big Moments, which will compete with rivals Facebook and Twitter in delivering the latest breaking news updates during major events. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the search engine to react quickly and constantly to its users' needs for the latest and most authoritative information, according to Google. A team at Google has been working on the project for over a year, after the company struggled to provide the latest updates on the U.S. Capitol attack in January and Black Lives Matter protests last summer, says The Information, a Silicon Valley-basedtechnology news site. Big Moments hopes to build upon Google's Full Coverage feature, which it launched in Google News in 2018 and later integrated with its search engine in March of 2021. Full Coverage allows users to tap into a news headline and see how that story is reported from a variety of sources.