SWISH: Semantic Analysis of Window Titles and Switching History

Task assignment

People often work on several desktop tasks in parallel or in quick succession, which makes switching and resuming work an overhead in itself. We focused on automatically identifying those tasks by finding which open windows belonged together.

SWISH continuously logged window events, and we combined two signals of relatedness: semantic similarity between window titles and temporal proximity in access patterns. Probabilistic latent semantic analysis grouped windows across applications, so a document, browser page, message, and presentation could be assigned to the same task even though they came from different programs.

We evaluated SWISH on four hours of manually labeled activity from one user, covering five tasks; 20–30% of the observed windows did not belong to any of those main tasks. In one-hour subsets, where the user worked on an average of three tasks, our best three-cluster configuration reached 76% average recall over 30 runs. Preprocessing window-title text had a significant positive effect.

The dataset's single user and short duration are substantial limitations. Window titles can also be sparse or misleading, and temporal proximity alone cannot distinguish every interleaved task. We established a useful task-assignment signal, not a general model of desktop work.

Publications

Conference paper
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Formatted citation

Nuria Oliver, Greg Smith, Chintan Thakkar, Arun C. Surendran (2006). SWISH: Semantic Analysis of Window Titles and Switching History. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2006), 194-201. https://doi.org/10.1145/1111449.1111492

BibTeX
@inproceedings{oliver2006swish,
  author = {Nuria Oliver and Greg Smith and Chintan Thakkar and Arun C. Surendran},
  title = {{SWISH}: Semantic Analysis of Window Titles and Switching History},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2006)},
  pages = {194--201},
  year = 2006,
  doi = {10.1145/1111449.1111492},
  cites = 136,
  citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}

SWISH: Semantic Analysis of Window Titles and Switching History

Nuria Oliver, Greg Smith, Chintan Thakkar, Arun C. Surendran
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2006) · 2006

Presentation