Discovery-Oriented Faceting: From Coverage to Blind-Spot Discovery

TL;DR

This paper introduces Discovery-Oriented Faceting (DOF), a system that emphasizes surfacing unusual or minority content in large document collections, contrasting with traditional coverage-focused methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel approach to document exploration that prioritizes blind-spot discovery by organizing content into distinctive categories, enabling better detection of unusual information.

Findings

DOF surfaces different, more specialized content compared to coverage methods.

Categories ranked by distinctiveness highlight minority and edge cases.

DOF promotes discovery of unexpected insights in large text collections.

Abstract

When people explore large document collections to build understanding, they face a challenge: existing AI tools help them see what is central but tend to hide what is unusual. Summarization and topic modeling optimize for coverage, representing main themes while pushing minority viewpoints and edge cases out of view. This matters because discovery often depends on noticing what does not fit, such as unexpected findings, minority positions, or gaps in the literature. When tools hide this content, users may miss insights that could change their understanding. In this paper, we explore an alternative objective: blind-spot discovery, where the goal is to surface content that coverage methods suppress so that people can judge its significance for themselves. We propose three design goals and illustrate them through DOF (Discovery-Oriented Faceting), a system that organizes documents into categories with explicit boundaries, ranks categories by distinctiveness rather than size, and supports iterative refinement. Comparing DOF against coverage-based ranking across four domains, we find that the two approaches surface fundamentally different content, with DOF promoting specialized categories that coverage methods bury. We discuss how shifting from coverage to discovery may offer a complementary mode of support for people exploring large text collections.