MS-LaTTE: A Dataset of Where and When To-do Tasks are Completed

TL;DR

This paper introduces MS-LaTTE, a large-scale dataset capturing location and time context of real-life task completions, enabling new research in understanding and predicting task behavior.

Contribution

The paper presents MS-LaTTE, a novel dataset with annotations on task location and timing, and demonstrates its utility through predictive modeling of task co-occurrence.

Findings

Predictors for co-location and co-time are learnable.

A BERT-based model outperforms baselines in predicting task co-occurrence.

The dataset captures intuitive contextual properties of common tasks.

Abstract

Tasks are a fundamental unit of work in the daily lives of people, who are increasingly using digital means to keep track of, organize, triage and act on them. These digital tools -- such as task management applications -- provide a unique opportunity to study and understand tasks and their connection to the real world, and through intelligent assistance, help people be more productive. By logging signals such as text, timestamp information, and social connectivity graphs, an increasingly rich and detailed picture of how tasks are created and organized, what makes them important, and who acts on them, can be progressively developed. Yet the context around actual task completion remains fuzzy, due to the basic disconnect between actions taken in the real world and telemetry recorded in the digital world. Thus, in this paper we compile and release a novel, real-life, large-scale dataset called MS-LaTTE that captures two core aspects of the context surrounding task completion: location and time. We describe our annotation framework and conduct a number of analyses on the data that were collected, demonstrating that it captures intuitive contextual properties for common tasks. Finally, we test the dataset on the two problems of predicting spatial and temporal task co-occurrence, concluding that predictors for co-location and co-time are both learnable, with a BERT fine-tuned model outperforming several other baselines. The MS-LaTTE dataset provides an opportunity to tackle many new modeling challenges in contextual task understanding and we hope that its release will spur future research in task intelligence more broadly.