  While digital assistants are increasingly used to help with various
productivity tasks, less attention has been paid to employing them in the
domain of business documents. To build an agent that can handle users'
information needs in this domain, we must first understand the types of
assistance that users desire when working on their documents. In this work, we
present results from two user studies that characterize the information needs
and queries of authors, reviewers, and readers of business documents. In the
first study, we used experience sampling to collect users' questions in-situ as
they were working with their documents, and in the second, we built a
human-in-the-loop document Q&A system which rendered assistance with a variety
of users' questions. Our results have implications for the design of document
assistants that complement AI with human intelligence including whether
particular skillsets or roles within the document are needed from human
respondents, as well as the challenges around such systems.

Human-Computer Interaction