The role of conversational assistants has become more prevalent in helping
people increase their productivity. Document-centered assistance, for example
to help an individual quickly review a document, has seen less significant
progress, even though it has the potential to tremendously increase a user's
productivity. This type of document-centered assistance is the focus of this
paper. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We first present a survey to
understand the space of document-centered assistance and the capabilities
people expect in this scenario. (2) We investigate the types of queries that
users will pose while seeking assistance with documents, and show that
document-centered questions form the majority of these queries. (3) We present
a set of initial machine learned models that show that (a) we can accurately
detect document-centered questions, and (b) we can build reasonably accurate
models for answering such questions. These positive results are encouraging,
and suggest that even greater results may be attained with continued study of
this interesting and novel problem space. Our findings have implications for
the design of intelligent systems to support task completion via natural
interactions with documents.Comment: Accepted as full paper at CHIIR 2020; 9 pages + Appendi