Leveraging Community-Generated Videos and Command Logs to Classify and Recommend Software Workflows

Users of complex software applications often rely on inefficient or suboptimal workflows because they are not aware that better methods exist. In this paper, we develop and validate a hierarchical approach combining topic modeling and frequent pattern mining to classify the workflows offered by an application, based on a corpus of community-generated videos and command logs. We then propose and evaluate a design space of four different workflow recommender algorithms, which can be used to recommend new workflows and their associated videos to software users. An expert validation of the task classification approach found that 82% of the time, experts agreed with the classifications. We also evaluate our workflow recommender algorithms, demonstrating their potential and suggesting avenues for future work.