Stojan Trajanovski


2021

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When does text prediction benefit from additional context? An exploration of contextual signals for chat and email messages
Stojan Trajanovski | Chad Atalla | Kunho Kim | Vipul Agarwal | Milad Shokouhi | Chris Quirk
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Papers

Email and chat communication tools are increasingly important for completing daily tasks. Accurate real-time phrase completion can save time and bolster productivity. Modern text prediction algorithms are based on large language models which typically rely on the prior words in a message to predict a completion. We examine how additional contextual signals (from previous messages, time, and subject) affect the performance of a commercial text prediction model. We compare contextual text prediction in chat and email messages from two of the largest commercial platforms Microsoft Teams and Outlook, finding that contextual signals contribute to performance differently between these scenarios. On emails, time context is most beneficial with small relative gains of 2% over baseline. Whereas, in chat scenarios, using a tailored set of previous messages as context yields relative improvements over the baseline between 9.3% and 18.6% across various critical service-oriented text prediction metrics.