Contexty: Capturing and Organizing In-situ Thoughts for Context-Aware AI Support

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kim, Yoonsu, Park, Chanbin, Son, Kihoon, Yang, Saelyne, Kim, Juho
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kim, Yoonsu
Park, Chanbin
Son, Kihoon
Yang, Saelyne
Kim, Juho
author_facet Kim, Yoonsu
Park, Chanbin
Son, Kihoon
Yang, Saelyne
Kim, Juho
contents During complex knowledge work, people engage in iterative sensemaking: interpreting information, connecting ideas, and refining their understanding. Yet in current human-AI collaboration, these cognitive processes are difficult to share and organize for AI. They arise in situ and are rarely captured without interrupting the task, and even when expressed, remain scattered or reduced to system-generated summaries that fail to reflect users' cognitive processes. We address this challenge by enabling AI context that is grounded in users' cognitive traces and can be directly inspected and revised by the user. We first explore this through a probe system that supports in-situ snippet memoing, allowing users to easily share their cognitive moves. Our study (N=10) highlights the value of capturing such context and the challenge of organizing it once accumulated. We then present Contexty, which supports users in inspecting and refining these contexts to better reflect their understanding of the task. Our evaluation (N=12) showed that Contexty improved task awareness, thought structuring, and users' sense of authorship and control, with participants preferring snippet-grounded AI responses over non-grounded ones (78.1%). We discuss how capturing and organizing users' cognitive context enables AI as a context-aware collaborator while preserving user agency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_11067
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contexty: Capturing and Organizing In-situ Thoughts for Context-Aware AI Support
Kim, Yoonsu
Park, Chanbin
Son, Kihoon
Yang, Saelyne
Kim, Juho
Human-Computer Interaction
During complex knowledge work, people engage in iterative sensemaking: interpreting information, connecting ideas, and refining their understanding. Yet in current human-AI collaboration, these cognitive processes are difficult to share and organize for AI. They arise in situ and are rarely captured without interrupting the task, and even when expressed, remain scattered or reduced to system-generated summaries that fail to reflect users' cognitive processes. We address this challenge by enabling AI context that is grounded in users' cognitive traces and can be directly inspected and revised by the user. We first explore this through a probe system that supports in-situ snippet memoing, allowing users to easily share their cognitive moves. Our study (N=10) highlights the value of capturing such context and the challenge of organizing it once accumulated. We then present Contexty, which supports users in inspecting and refining these contexts to better reflect their understanding of the task. Our evaluation (N=12) showed that Contexty improved task awareness, thought structuring, and users' sense of authorship and control, with participants preferring snippet-grounded AI responses over non-grounded ones (78.1%). We discuss how capturing and organizing users' cognitive context enables AI as a context-aware collaborator while preserving user agency.
title Contexty: Capturing and Organizing In-situ Thoughts for Context-Aware AI Support
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11067