A system and method for browsing, retrieving, and recommending information from
a collection uses multi-modal features of the documents in the collection, as well
as an analysis of users' prior browsing and retrieval behavior. The system and
method are premised on various disclosed methods for quantitatively representing
documents in a document collection as vectors in multi-dimensional vector spaces,
quantitatively determining similarity between documents, and clustering documents
according to those similarities. The system and method also rely on methods for
quantitatively representing users in a user population, quantitatively determining
similarity between users, clustering users according to those similarities, and
visually representing clusters of users by analogy to clusters of documents.
