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; calculating a Prior probability score for each document of a candidate list including at least a portion of the documents of the embedding space, the Prior probability score indicating a preliminary probability, for each particular document of the candidate list, that the particular document is the desired document; a computer system identifying toward the user an initial (i=0) collection of N0>1 candidate documents from the candidate list in dependence on the calculated Prior probability scores for the documents in the candidate list, the initial collection of candidate documents having fewer documents than the candidate list; and for each i'th iteration in a plurality of iterations, beginning with a first iteration (i=1) and in response to user selection of an i'th selected document from the (i−1)'th collection of candidate documents, identifying toward the user an i'th collection of Ni>1 candidate documents from the candidate list in dependence on Posterior probability scores for at least a portion of the documents in the candidate list, Ni being smaller than the number of documents in the candidate list, the Posterior probability score for each given document D being given by P(C|D)P(D), where C is the sequence of documents c 1 ,. .. , c i selected by the user up through the i'th iteration, where P(C|D) is the system's view of the probability of C if the desired document is D and where P(D) is the calculated Prior probability score for document D.