Exploiting the user interaction context for automatic task detection

Detecting the task a user is performing on his/her computer desktop is important in order to provide him/her with contextualized and personalized support. Some recent approaches propose to perform automatic user task detection by means of classifiers using captured user context data. In this paper we improve on that by using an ontology-based user interaction context model that can be automatically populated by (1) capturing simple user interaction events on the computer desktop and (2) applying rule-based and information extraction mechanisms. We present evaluation results from a large user study we have carried out in a knowledge-intensive business environment, showing that our ontology-based approach provides new contextual features yielding good task-detection performance. We also argue that good results can be achieved by training task classifiers offline on user context data gathered in laboratory settings. Finally, we isolate a combination of contextual features that present a significantly better discriminative power than classical ones.