Exploring bilingual, task-oriented, document-centric chat

Abstract

We study a new type of workplace communication made possible by the recent advent of real-time bilingual chat tools. Because of the imperfect accuracy of real-time text translation services, this type of communication imposes extreme difficulties on user collaboration and task performance. The problems are compounded by the narrow task awareness and communication bandwidth afforded by standard chat. We report an exploratory study of users attempting to arrive at a joint understanding of a document using a bilingual chat tool. We observed many problems concerning the establishment of common ground and task coordination. We derive design implications for an improved chat tool that better supports the sharing of mental state and task coordination in this communication environment. © 2009 ACM.