Investigating a Mixed-Initiative Workflow for Digital Mind-Mapping

In this paper, we report on our investigation of human-AI collaboration for mind-mapping. We specifically focus on problem exploration in pre-conceptualization stages of early design. Our approach leverages the notion of query expansion-the process of refining a given search query for improving information retrieval. Assuming a mind-map as a network of nodes, we reformulate its construction process as a sequential interaction workflow wherein a human user and an intelligent agent take turns to add one node to the network at a time. Our contribution is the design, implementation, and evaluation of algorithm that powers the intelligent agent (IA). This paper is an extension of our prior work (Chen et al., 2019, "Mini-Map: Mixed-Initiative Mind-Mapping Via Contextual Query Expansion," AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum, p. 2347) wherein we developed this algorithm, dubbed Mini-Map, and implemented a web-based workflow enabled by ConceptNet (a large graph-based representation of "commonsense" knowledge). In this paper, we extend our prior work through a comprehensive comparison between human-AI collaboration and human-human collaboration for mind-mapping. We specifically extend our prior work by: (a) expanding on our previous quantitative analysis using established metrics and semantic studies, (b) presenting a new detailed video protocol analysis of the mind-mapping process, and (c) providing design implications for digital mind-mapping tools.