Are You Busy, Cool, or just Curious? —CAFE: A Model with Three Different States of Mind for a User to Manage Information in Electronic Mail

[Note: This article has been amended and republished in issue 2(2). Please refer to humanit.hb.se/article/view/495 for the final version.] The design and implementation of a conceptual model, CAFE (a Categorization Assistant For E-mail), is described. The model supports the organization, searching, and retrieval of information in e-mail. Three modes are available for satisfying the users’ needs in various situations: the Busy mode for intermittent use at times of high stress, the Cool mode for continuous use at the computer, and the Curious mode for sporadic use when exploring and (re-)organizing messages when more time is at hand. In the implementation each mode required using a different technique. The Busy mode uses the text-based Naive Bayesian algorithm, the Cool mode uses standard e-mail filtering rules, and the Curious mode uses a combination of clustering techniques known as Scatter/Gather. The design of the model is motivated partly by cognitive science theories (employed partly in a case study of categorization on the computer screen), and partly by a survey of e-mail clients. The model is related to information seeking theories in electronic environments.

[1]  Brian Vickery,et al.  Information Science in Theory and Practice , 1987 .

[2]  Edward E. Smith,et al.  An Invitation to cognitive science , 1997 .

[3]  Elizabeth D. Liddy,et al.  Text categorization for multiple users based on semantic features from a machine-readable dictionary , 1994, TOIS.

[4]  Larry Wall,et al.  Programming Perl , 1991 .

[5]  David R. Karger,et al.  Scatter/Gather: a cluster-based approach to browsing large document collections , 1992, SIGIR '92.

[6]  Luis Mateus Rocha.  Cognitive categorization revisited: extending interval valued fuzzy sets as simulation tools for concept combination , 1994, NAFIPS/IFIS/NASA '94. Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of The North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society Biannual Conference. The Industrial Fuzzy Control and Intellige.

[7]  Alberto J. Cañas,et al.  Measuring the Effectiveness of Personal Database Structures , 1989, Int. J. Man Mach. Stud..

[8]  L. R. Rasmussen,et al.  In information retrieval: data structures and algorithms , 1992 .

[9]  Chris Schmandt,et al.  CLUES: dynamic personalized message filtering , 1996, CSCW '96.

[10]  Wendy E. Mackay,et al.  Diversity in the use of electronic mail: a preliminary inquiry , 1988, TOIS.

[11]  E. Rosch,et al.  Cognition and Categorization , 1980 .

[12]  Alberto J. Cañas,et al.  A conceptual model and experiments on how people classify and retrieve documents , 1985, SIGIR '85.

[13]  Nathaniel S. Borenstein,et al.  MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies , 1992, RFC.

[14]  Charles T. Meadow,et al.  Text information retrieval systems , 1992 .

[15]  Eleanor Rosch,et al.  Principles of Categorization , 1978 .

[16]  J A Swets,et al.  Information Retrieval Systems. , 1963, Science.

[17]  Daniel Gopher,et al.  The Blackwell dictionary of Cognitive Psychology , 1990 .

[18]  A. C. Kilgour,et al.  Electronic mail: case study in task-oriented restructuring of application domain , 1994 .

[19]  S. Kiesler,et al.  Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. , 1992 .

[20]  Terri Gullickson,et al.  Encyclopedia of human behavior , 1995 .

[21]  Michael McGill,et al.  Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval , 1983 .

[22]  D LiddyElizabeth,et al.  Text categorization for multiple users based on semantic features from a machine-readable dictionary , 1994 .

[23]  Juha Takkinen,et al.  CAFE: Towards a Conceptual Model for Information Management in Electronic Mail , 1997 .

[24]  Marti A. Hearst,et al.  Reexamining the cluster hypothesis: scatter/gather on retrieval results , 1996, SIGIR '96.

[25]  Lee Sproull,et al.  Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization , 1991 .

[26]  B. Warburton.  Electronic mail. , 1996, Modern midwife.

[27]  Gary Marchionini,et al.  Information Seeking in Electronic Environments , 1995 .