Hello, everyone.
My name is Bahar, and I'm going to talk to you about our work
on characterizing stage-aware writing
assistance in collaborative documents authoring
in collaboration with my coauthors
from Microsoft Research and University of Waterloo.
If you think about the process of writing,
whether individually or in collaboration with others,
you see that the writers do not go from a blank page
to a fully written documents in a linear fashion.
Rather, they may go through these overlapping and sometimes
cyclical stages of planning, drafting, revising, and so on.
While the writers progress through these stages,
they might have very different mental models and writing
needs.
And this process is often very complex and cognitively
demanding that could perhaps benefit
from some kind of writing assistance
that is aware of these stages.
We have all these past models that
characterize the process of writing
in terms of a series of these stages,
and other past research that showed
that some kind of phased writing process
could help with structuring writing and guiding
collaboration.
However, when we look at the modern writing applications
today, we don't see that these stages
are leveraged in any way in the types of support
they provide throughout the lifetime of a document.
So the very main question you're asking in this paper
is, what do we need to enable such stage-aware writing
assistance.
That is now translated into these three research questions.
Up first, do authors actually perceive stages as they write?
Second, how should this stage-aware assistance look
like?
And finally, are we able to infer these stages of document
writing automatically?
To do that, we did this mixed methods approach
by combining findings from three studies--
a qualitative one through a survey, a quantitative one
through a large scale analysis of logs of Microsoft Word,
and, finally, a feasibility study
that looked at whether we can predict
the stages of documents.
I'm going to leave out this last study from this presentation.
So the goal of our qualitative study
was to characterize stage-aware writing assistance
through looking at two different aspects.
First, what is a stage of a document?
And second, how should stage-appropriate writing
assistance look like?
You can look at the paper for the details of the survey we
conducted, but the main question I'm going to highlight here is,
should an intelligent writing assistant
provide different types of support
at different stages of writing in the document?
Through the responses we received
and the qualitative coding we did,
we learned that, first of all, the writers
of a shared documents perceived the stage of a document
in three different yet related ways.
Also, we learned that the writers
do attribute different types of activities
to different stages of writing.
So the main two takeaways from this qualitative study
was, first, this link between temporal stages of writing
and document lifespan.
And second, stage-appropriate writing assistance
means being able to identify these activities that
are associated with each stage and support them accordingly.
So in order to validate these observations that came out
of the qualitative study at scale
and through an actual interaction traces of users
working with a writing application,
we formulated three related research questions
that I will get back to shortly.
But first, let's see how the data set
looked like for this quantitative study.
So we used the telemetry logs of users
interacting with the UI functionalities of Microsoft
Word.
But for privacy reasons, we did not
have access to the content of the documents, or any revision
histories, or any information about the users.
In order to learn more how we were
able to manage this kind of analysis
given this limitation in the data set,
please look at the paper.
So the very first question we were interested to see was,
do authors actually interact with the writing application
differently throughout the lifetime of the document?
For that, we tracked the Contributions Across Time
or, as we call it in the paper, the CAT distributions.
And these patterns were quite interesting
because, as you can see, there's these two
peaks at the very beginning and the end of the lifetime.
And this pattern kind of persisted
throughout all sorts of document types
we looked at-- from single author
to multi-author, different number of collaborators,
different lifetimes for documents.
And it has very interesting implications
because, first of all, it shows how writers
distribute their writing load or workload
throughout the lifetime of the document and, second,
how we can track these interaction rates
and be able to predict the lifetime of a document
early on.
The second question we looked at was whether there are actually
noticeable differences in the types of activities
writers do at different stages.
And through our log analysis, we were
able to have these categories of early, middle, and late stage
activities.
And finally, with respect to the modes of writing,
we compared the very first activities
of first writers and second writers
at the moment they arrive at a document for the first time
to see if these activities are any different.
And they, indeed, were.
For example, we found that the second authors
were three times more likely to appear on the shared
document with a communication intent,
or seven times more likely to appear for the first time
with typing intent.
So I'm going to skip the summary for now,
and then thank you so much.