Helping Users Sort Faster with Adaptive Machine Learning Recommendations

Sorting and clustering large numbers of documents can be an overwhelming task: manual solutions tend to be slow, while machine learning systems often present results that don't align well with users' intents. We created and evaluated a system for helping users sort large numbers of documents into clusters. iCluster has the capability to recommend new items for existing clusters and appropriate clusters for items. The recommendations are based on a learning model that adapts over time - as the user adds more items to a cluster, the system's model improves and the recommendations become more relevant. Thirty-two subjects used iCluster to sort hundreds of data items both with and without recommendations; we found that recommendations allow users to sort items more rapidly. A pool of 161 raters then assessed the quality of the resulting clusters, finding that clusters generated with recommendations were of statistically indistinguishable quality. Both the manual and assisted methods were substantially better than a fully automatic method.