Abstract: Roughly described, a system for user identification of a desired document. A database identifies a catalog of documents in an embedding space, in which the distance between documents corresponds to a measure of their dissimilarity. The system presents an initial collection of the documents toward the user from an initial candidate space which is part of the embedding space, then in response to iterative user input, refines the candidate space and subsequent collections of documents presented toward the user. The initial collection is determined using a weighted cost-based iterative addition to the initial collection of documents from the initial candidate space, trading off between two sub-objectives of representativeness and diversity.

Abstract: Roughly described, a system for user identification of a desired document. A database identifies a catalog of documents in an embedding space, in which the distance between documents corresponds to a measure of their dissimilarity. The system presents an initial collection of the documents toward the user from an initial candidate space which is part of the embedding space, then in response to iterative user input, refines the candidate space and subsequent collections of documents presented toward the user. The initial collection is determined using a weighted cost-based iterative addition to the initial collection of documents from the initial candidate space, trading off between two sub-objectives of representativeness and diversity.