Capturing Common Knowledge about Tasks: Intelligent Assistance for To-Do Lists

Although to-do lists are a ubiquitous form of personal task management, there has been no work on intelligent assistance to automate, elaborate, or coordinate a user’s to-dos. Our research focuses on three aspects of intelligent assistance for to-dos. We investigated the use of intelligent agents to automate to-dos in an office setting. We collected a large corpus from users and developed a paraphrase-based approach to matching agent capabilities with to-dos. We also investigated to-dos for personal tasks and the kinds of assistance that can be offered to users by elaborating on them on the basis of substep knowledge extracted from the Web. Finally, we explored coordination of user tasks with other users through a to-do management application deployed in a popular social networking site. We discuss the emergence of Social Task Networks, which link users‘ tasks to their social network as well as to relevant resources on the Web. We show the benefits of using common sense knowledge to interpret and elaborate to-dos. Conversely, we also show that to-do lists are a valuable way to create repositories of common sense knowledge about tasks.