Abstract
There were 108.7 billion business emails sent daily in 2014, many of them to contact centers. A number of automated email answering techniques have been explored in order to ease the burden of manual handling of the messages. Most techniques stem from three text retrieval approaches—text categorization by machine learning, statistical text similarity calculation, matching of text patterns and templates. The paper discusses the previous research in automated email answering and compares the techniques.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Radicati, S.: Email Statistics Report, 2014-2018. Radicati Group, April (2014)
Suneson, B.: E-post är dyrare men ger kunden bättre svar. Svenska Dagbladet (April 4, 2005). In Swedish
Tang, G., Pei, J., Luk, W. S.: Email mining: tasks, common techniques, and tools. Knowledge and Information Systems, 41(1), pp. 1-31 (2014)
Andrenucci, A., Sneiders, E.: Automated Question Answering: Review of the Main Approaches. In: Proc. 3rd International Conference on Information Technology and Applications (ICITA). IEEE, Vol. 2, pp.514-519 (2005)
Busemann, S., Schmeier, S., Arens, R. G.: Message classification in the call center. In: Proc. Sixth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, pp. 158-165. ACL (2000)
Scheffer, T.: Email answering assistance by semi-supervised text classification. Intelligent Data Analysis, vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 481-493. IOS Press (2004)
Bickel, S., Scheffer, T.: Learning from message pairs for automatic email answering. Machine Learning: ECML 2004. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 87-98 (2004)
Lapalme, G., Kosseim, L.: Mercure: Towards an automatic e-mail follow-up system. IEEE Computational Intelligence Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 14-18 (2003)
Yang, W., Kwok, L. Improving the automatic email responding system for computer manufacturers via machine learning. In: Proc. Information Management, Innovation Management and Industrial Engineering (ICIII), Vol. 3. IEEE (2012)
Hewlett, W.R., Freed, M.: An Email Assistant that Learns to Suggest Reusable Replies. In: Papers from the 2008 AAAI Workshop, Technical Report WS-08-04, pp. 28-35 (2008)
Itakura, K., Kenmotsu, M., Oka, H., Akiyoshi, M.: An Identification Method of Inquiry E-mails to the Matching FAQ for Automatic Question Answering. Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence, pp. 213-219. Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2010)
Alberts, I., Forest, D.: Email pragmatics and automatic classification: A study in the organizational context. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63, no. 5, pp. 904-922 (2012)
Malik, R., Subramaniam, V., Kaushik, S.: Automatically Selecting Answer Templates to Respond to Customer Emails. In: Proc. IJCAI, Vol. 7, pp. 1659-1664 (2007)
Alfalahi, A., Eriksson, G., Sneiders, E.: Shadow Answers as an Intermediary in Email Answer Retrieval. In: Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, pp. 209-214. Springer International Publishing (2015)
Weng, S.S., Liu, C.K.: Using text classification and multiple concepts to answer e-mails. Expert Systems with applications 26, no. 4, pp. 529-543 (2004)
Kosseim, L., Beauregard, S., Lapalme, G.: Using information extraction and natural language generation to answer e-mail. Data & Knowledge Engineering, vol. 38, pp. 85-100 (2001)
Al-Alwani, A.: Improving Email Response in an Email Management System Using Natural Language Processing Based Probabilistic Methods. Journal of Computer Science 11, no. 1, pp. 109-119 (2015)
Marom, Y., Zukerman, I.: Towards a Framework for Collating Help-desk Responses from Multiple Documents. In: Proc. IJCAI Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Answering Questions, Edinburgh, Scotland, pp. 32–39 (2005)
Sneiders, E.: Automated Email Answering by Text Pattern Matching. In: H. Loftsson, E. Rögnvaldsson, S. Helgadóttir (eds.): Proc. 7th International Conference on Natural Lan-guage Processing (IceTAL), LNAI 6233, pp. 381-392. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Sneiders, E., Sjöbergh, J., Alfalahi, A.: Email Answering by Matching Question and Context-Specific Text Patterns: Performance and Error Analysis. In: Proc. WorldCist’16, Recife, Brazil, March 22-24. Springer International Publishing (2016)
Khosravi, H., Wilks, Y.: Routing email automatically by purpose not topic. Natural Language Engineering, 5, pp. 237-250 (1999)
Corston-Oliver, S., Ringger, E., Gamon, M., Campbell, R.: Task-focused summarization of email. In: Proc. ACL-04 Workshop: Text Summarization Branches Out, pp. 43-50 (2004)
Cohen, W.W., Carvalho, V.R., Mitchell, T.M.: Learning to Classify Email into “Speech Acts”. In: Proc. EMNLP, pp. 309-316 (2004)
Goldstein, J., Sabin, R.E.: Using speech acts to categorize email and identify email genres. In: Proc. 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, vol. 3. IEEE (2006)
Lampert, A., Dale, R., Paris, C.: The nature of requests and commitments in email messages. In: Proc. of the AAAI Workshop on Enhanced Messaging, pp. 42-47 (2008)
Lampert, A., Dale, R., Paris, C.: Requests and Commitments in Email are More Complex Than You Think: Eight Reasons to be Cautious. In: Proc. Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop, vol. 6, pp. 64-72 (2008)
Sneiders, E.: Automated Question Answering Using Question Templates that Cover the Conceptual Model of the Database. In: Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. Proc. NLDB’2002. Springer LNCS series 2553, pp. 235-239 (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sneiders, E. (2016). Review of the Main Approaches to Automated Email Answering. In: Rocha, Á., Correia, A., Adeli, H., Reis, L., Mendonça Teixeira, M. (eds) New Advances in Information Systems and Technologies. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 444. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31232-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31232-3_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31231-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31232-3
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)