Sunday, May 20, 2012

Spam ads

Google's contextual ads are too "contextual". For instance, when you visit your own GMail spam folder, it prompts you with an ad for the term "spam", as you can check from the picture below:


You might notice the "Ginger Spam Salad" recipe link that appears over the "Delete forever button".

This phenomenon allows me to talk about "Word Sense Disambiguation", a Natural Language Processing technique that Google seems not using in this situation. Basically, Google is not able to distinguish between the two senses of the word "spam" (corned beef and unsolicited mail).

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