Collaborative Intent Prediction with Real-Time Contextual Data

Intelligent personal assistants on mobile devices such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft Cortana are increasingly important. Instead of passively reacting to queries, they provide users with brand new proactive experiences that aim to offer the right information at the right time. It is, therefore, crucial for personal assistants to understand users’ intent, that is, what information users need now. Intent is closely related to context. Various contextual signals, including spatio-temporal information and users’ activities, can signify users’ intent. It is, however, challenging to model the correlation between intent and context. Intent and context are highly dynamic and often sequentially correlated. Contextual signals are usually sparse, heterogeneous, and not simultaneously available. We propose an innovative collaborative nowcasting model to jointly address all these issues. The model effectively addresses the complex sequential and concurring correlation between context and intent and recognizes users’ real-time intent with continuously arrived contextual signals. We extensively evaluate the proposed model with real-world data sets from a commercial personal assistant. The results validate the effectiveness the proposed model, and demonstrate its capability of handling the real-time flow of contextual signals. The studied problem and model also provide inspiring implications for new paradigms of recommendation on mobile intelligent devices.