A Mailbox Search Engine Using Query Multi-modal Expansion and Community-Based Smoothing

Abstract

This demo introduces a new tool (or plug-in) for any email client that automatically decomposes the (personal or shared) mailbox into new virtual folders, corresponding to topics and communities, in an unsupervised way to lighten end-user load. The proposed software implements a retrieval system where the user can search for emails but also for people by submitting a double-faceted query: “key words” and “key persons”. The software is able to retrieve three kind of documents that a matching search-based system would not retrieve. Firstly, by using person profiles, the software will rank documents related to the key persons without requiring them to be participant (i.e. being author or recipient). Secondly, the system will retrieve documents sharing the same topics as the key words but not necessarily containing them. Thirdly, the proposed solution will also retrieve other participants who are members of the communities associated to the key persons.