Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. This process can quickly become a serious problem for users with large volumes of email. Studies have found that people use a variety of approaches to triage their email, many of which have a social component. We believe that email clients can better support email triage by providing users with additional sorting features based on socially salient information. We present a prototype email client, SNARF (the Social Network and Relationship Finder), that aggregates social meta-data about email correspondents to aid email triage. Users can then sort their correspondents based on this meta-data, bringing emails from socially important people to the foreground. 1

One of the most challenging problems facing builders and facilitators of community networks is to create and sustain social engagement among members. In this paper, we investigate the drivers of social engagement in a community network through the analysis of three data sources: activity logs, a member survey, and the content analysis of the conversation archives. We describe three important ways to encourage and support social engagement in online communities: through system design elements such as conversation channeling and event notification, by various selection criteria for community members, and through facilitation of specific kinds of discussion topics.

In this paper the results of a two-year ethnographic study of the personal document management of 28 information workers is described. Both the paper and digital domain were taken into account during the study. The results reaffirmed that document management is strongly related to task management. Digital tools do not adequately support two important user needs related to task management, namely that documents should be embedded within meaningful (task-related) context information, and that they should be easily accessible for regrouping as the task goes on. In contrast, paper supports these needs very well. Following a discussion of personal document management using paper, email, and digital file folder structures, six implications are outlined for the design of digital document management systems that combine the advantages of both domains. ACM Classification: H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. Keywords: Paper-digital integration, document management, paper, email, ethnography.

Almost every office worker can relate to feelings of email overload and stress, but in reality the concept of email strain is not well understood. In this paper, we describe a large-scale nationwide organizational survey examining the relationship between email use and feelings of email overload and task coordination. We found that higher email volume was associated with increased feelings of email overload, but this relationship was moderated by certain email management strategies. The contribution to the field of CSCW is a better understanding of the concept of email related stress, and initial scale development for the assessment of email-related overload and perceptions of the work-importance of email.

In this paper, we study the problem of summarizing email conversations. We first build a sentence quotation graph that captures the conversation structure among emails. We adopt three cohesion measures: clue words, semantic similarity and cosine similarity as the weight of the edges. Second, we use two graph-based summarization approaches, Generalized ClueWordSummarizer and Page-Rank, to extract sentences as summaries. Third, we propose a summarization approach based on subjective opinions and integrate it with the graph-based ones. The empirical evaluation shows that the basic clue words have the highest accuracy among the three cohesion measures. Moreover, subjective words can significantly improve accuracy. 1

In this paper we investigate information scraps – personal information where content has been scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on the corners of sheets of paper, stuck in our pockets, sent in e-mail messages to ourselves, and stashed in miscellaneous digital text files. Information scraps encode information ranging from ideas and sketches to notes, reminders, shipment tracking numbers, driving directions, and even poetry. Although information scraps are ubiquitous, we have much still to learn about these loose forms of information practice. Why do we keep information scraps outside of our traditional PIM applications? What role do information scraps play in our overall information practice? How might PIM applications be better designed to accommodate and support information scraps ’ creation, manipulation and retrieval? We pursued these questions by studying the information scrap practices of 27 knowledge workers at five organizations. Our observations shed light on information scraps ’ content, form, media and location. From this data, we elaborate on the typical information scrap lifecycle, and identify common roles that information scraps play: temporary storage, archiving, work-in-progress, reminding, and management of unusual data. These roles suggest a set of unmet design needs in current PIM tools: lightweight entry, unconstrained content, flexible use and adaptability, visibility, and mobility.

We consider the problem of learning a mapping from question to answer messages. The training data for this problem consist of pairs of messages that have been received and sent in the past. We formulate the problem setting, discuss appropriate performance metrics, develop a solution and describe two baseline methods for comparison. We present a case study based on...

bellotti; duchen; mahoward;

Today many workers spend too much of their time translating their co-workers ’ requests into structures that information systems can understand. This paper presents the novel interaction design and evaluation of VIO, an agent that helps workers translate request. VIO monitors requests and makes suggestions to speed up the translation. VIO allows users to quickly correct agent errors. These corrections are used to improve agent performance as it learns to automate work. Our evaluations demonstrate that this type of agent can significantly reduce task completion time, freeing workers from mundane tasks. Author Keywords agents, interaction design, mixed initiative.

It has long been established that many workplace tasks are managed through email communication, and that these tasks involve the exchange of requests and commitments. Users would be better able to manage and monitor tasks in their email if systems could identify the utterances which place responsibility for action on themselves or others. Such systems require a robust understanding of which utterances convey requests and commitments. Previous attempts to classify similar phenomena in email have mostly been at the message level and have lacked detailed and robust category definitions that allow unambiguous classification at the utterance level. To address this gap, this paper presents precise definitions for classifying requests and commitments in email, based on concepts from Speech Act Theory, and informed by the results of two independent manual annotation experiments using data from the Enron email corpus. The specific surface realisation of requests and commitments in email are also considered, with the aim of clarifying how a range of potentially difficult cases should be dealt with. This paper thus contributes a well-grounded definitional basis for the classification of task-oriented speech acts in email.