Document Distance Metric Learning in an Interactive Exploration Process

Visualization of inter-document similarities is widely used for the exploration of document collections and interactive retrieval. However, similarity relationships between documents are multifaceted and measured distances by a given metric often do not match the perceived similarity of human beings. Furthermore, the user's notion of similarity can drastically change with the exploration objective or task at hand. Therefore, this research proposes to investigate online adjustments to the similarity model using feedback generated during exploration or exploratory search. In this course, rich visualizations and interactions will support users to give valuable feedback. Based on this, metric learning methodologies will be applied to adjust a similarity model in order to improve the exploration experience. At the same time, trained models are considered as valuable outcomes whose benefits for similarity-based tasks such as query-by-example retrieval or classification will be tested.