Visual Interactive Search

摘要

Roughly described, a system for user identification of a desired document. A database is provided which identifies a catalog of documents in an embedding space, the database identifying a distance in the embedding space between each pair of documents corresponding to a predetermined measure of dissimilarity between the pair of documents. The system presents an initial collection of the documents toward the user, from an initial candidate space which is part of the embedding space. The system then iteratively refines the candidate space using geometric constraints on the embedding space determined in response to relative feedback by the user. At each iteration the system identifies to the user a subset of documents from the then-current candidate space, based on which the user provides the relative feedback. In an embodiment, these subsets of documents are more discriminative than the average discriminativeness of similar sets of documents in the then-current candidate space.

主权项

1. A method for user identification of a desired document, comprising:
providing, accessibly to a computer system, a database identifying a catalog of documents in an embedding space, the database identifying a distance between each pair of the documents in the embedding space corresponding to a predetermined measure of dissimilarity between the pair of documents; a computer system identifying toward the user an initial (i=0) collection of N0>1 candidate documents from an initial (i=0) candidate space within the embedding space, the initial collection having fewer documents than the initial candidate space; for each i'th iteration in a plurality of iterations, beginning with a first iteration (i=1):
in response to user selection of an i'th selected subset of the documents from the (i−1)'th collection of documents, a computer system geometrically constraining the embedding space to identify an i'th candidate space such that, according to a predefined definition of collective closeness, the documents in the i'th candidate space are collectively closer in the embedding space to the documents in the i'th selected subset, than are the documents in the (i−1)'th candidate space; andidentifying toward the user an i'th collection of Ni>1 candidate documents from the i'th candidate space, Ni being smaller than the number of documents in the i'th candidate space; and taking action in response to user selection of a particular subset of documents identified toward the user, wherein the predefined definition of collective closeness is defined such that a candidate document X is considered closer to a document A than to a document B if in the embedding space, d(A,X)