This Email Could Save Your Life: Introducing the Task of Email Subject Line Generation

Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 446–456 Florence, Italy, July 28 - August 2, 2019. c⃝2019 Association for Computational Linguistics 446 This Email Could Save Your Life: Introducing the Task of Email Subject Line Generation Rui Zhang ∗ Yale University r.zhang@yale.edu Joel Tetreault Grammarly joel.tetreault@grammarly.com Abstract Given the overwhelming number of emails, an effective subject line becomes essential to bet- ter inform the recipient of the email’s content. In this paper, we propose and study the task of email subject line generation: automatically generating an email subject line from the email body. We create the first dataset for this task and find that email subject line generation fa- vor extremely abstractive summary which dif- ferentiates it from news headline generation or news single document summarization. We then develop a novel deep learning method and compare it to several baselines as well as re- cent state-of-the-art text summarization sys- tems. We also investigate the efficacy of sev- eral automatic metrics based on correlations with human judgments and propose a new au- tomatic evaluation metric. Our system outper- forms competitive baselines given both auto- matic and human evaluations. To our knowl- edge, this is the first work to tackle the prob- lem of effective email subject line generation. 1 Introduction Email is a ubiquitous form of online communica- tion. An email message consists of two basic el- ements: an email subject line and an email body. The subject line, which is displayed to the recipi- ent in the list of inbox messages, should tell what the email body is about and what the sender wants to convey. An effective email subject line becomes essential since it can help people manage a large number of emails. Table 1 shows an email body with three possible subject lines. There have been several research tracks around email usage. While much effort has been fo- cused on email summarization (Muresan et al., 2001; Nenkova and Bagga, 2003; Rambow et al., 2004), email keyword extraction and action detec- tion (Turney, 2000; Lahiri et al., 2017; Lin et al., ∗ Work done during the internship at Grammarly. Email Body: Hi All, I would be grateful if you could get to me today via email a job description for your current role. I would like to get this to the immigration attorneys so that they can finalise the paperwork in preparation for INS filing once the UBS deal is signed. Kind regards, Subject 1: Current Job Description Needed (COMMENT: This is good because it is both informative and succinct.) Subject 2: Job Description (COMMENT: This is okay but not informative enough.) Subject 3: Request (COMMENT: This is bad because it does not contain any specific information about the re- quest.) Table 1: An email with three possible subject lines. 2018), and email classification (Prabhakaran and Rambow, 2014; Alkhereyf and Rambow, 2017), to our knowledge there is no previous work on generating email subjects. In this paper, we pro- pose the task of …

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