SWISH: Semantic Analysis of Window Titles and Switching History

Task assignment

Information workers are often involved in multiple tasks that they must perform in parallel or in rapid succession, making task management itself a non-trivial overhead. Research on task management systems can help by enabling fast task switching, fast task resumption, and automatic task identification. In this paper we focus on automatically detecting the tasks that the user is involved in, by identifying which desktop windows are related to each other.

SWISH continuously logged window events and combined two signals of relatedness: semantic similarity between window titles and temporal proximity in access patterns. Its 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.

The evaluation used 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, the 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. The project established a promising task-assignment signal, not a general model of desktop work.

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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