What a proactive recommendation system needs relevance, non-intrusiveness, and a new long-term memory

The goal of the project À Propos is to develop a proactive, just-in-time recommendation system for professional writers. While authors are writing, the proactive system searches for relevant information to what is being written, and presents this information to the writers in a manner that is perceived as timely, non-intrusive, and trustworthy. In this paper we present our ideas and the first steps performed in order to reach this goal. Writing a professional document is a complex and highly demanding task that can be seriously affected by interruptions from the environment. Consequently, a proactive system should be 1) able to present highly relevant information consequently, 2) to identify in what stage of writing the author is involved, and what are the moments in which information needs are more important and less disruptive, and 3) serve as an external long-term memory for the writer. In this paper we describe the steps and first results of A Propos in order to develop a proactive recommendation system that covers these goals.