Tutorial on Task-Based Search and Assistance

While great strides are made in the field of search and recommendation, there are still challenges and opportunities to address information access issues that involve solving tasks and accomplishing goals for a wide variety of users. Specifically, we lack intelligent systems that can detect not only the request an individual is making (what), but also understand and utilize the intention (why) and strategies (how) while providing information. Many scholars in the fields of information retrieval, recommender systems, productivity (especially in task management and time management), and artificial intelligence have recognized the importance of extracting and understanding people's tasks and the intentions behind performing those tasks in order to serve them better. However, we are still struggling to support them in task completion, e.g., in search and assistance, it has been challenging to move beyond single-query or single-turn interactions. The proliferation of intelligent agents has opened up new modalities for interacting with information, but these agents will need to be able to work more intelligently in understanding the context and helping the users at task level. This tutorial will introduce the attendees to the issues of detecting, understanding, and using task and task-related information in an information episode (with or without active searching). Specifically, it will cover several recent theories, models, and methods that show how to represent tasks and use behavioral data to extract task information. It will then show how this knowledge or model could contribute to addressing emerging retrieval and recommendation problems.