Generating Overview Summaries of Ongoing Email Thread Discussions

Generating Overview Summaries of Ongoing Email Thread Discussions Stephen Wan Department of Computing Macquarie University Sydney NSW 2109 swan@ics.mq.edu.au Kathy McKeown Columbia University Department of Computer Science 1214 Amsterdam Avenue NY - 10027-7003, USA kathy@cs.columbia.edu Abstract The tedious task of responding to a backlog of email is one which is familiar to many researchers. As a subset of email management, we address the problem of constructing a summary of email discussions. Specifically, we examine ongoing discussions which will ultimately culminate in a consensus in a decision-making process. Our summary provides a snapshot of the current state- of-affairs of the discussion and facilitates a speedy response from the user, who might be the bottleneck in some matter being resolved. We present a method which uses the structure of the thread dialogue and word vector techniques to determine which sentence in the thread should be extracted as the main issue. Our solution successfully identifies the sentence containing the issue of the thread being discussed, potentially more informative than subject line. 1 Introduction Imagine the chore of sifting through your overflowing email inbox after an extended period away from the office. The discovery that some of these emails form part of a larger decision-making discussion only heightens the sense of urgency and stress. Such a discussion may require an urgent response and a user’s lack of contribution may be a bottleneck in some matter being resolved. Such a scenario is seems quite familiar and intuitively, one would expect that better solutions to presenting the contents of the email inbox might be useful in facilitating a timely reply to a missed email discussion. One such solution might be a summary of that very email discussion. However, it would be much more useful if the summary did not just tell the user what the thread is about. Such information might be easily obtained from the subject line, or if not, a conventional off-the-shelf summarizer might provide the gist of the thread quite easily. However, in contrast to a conventional sentence extraction summary in Figure 1, the ideal summary ought to provide sufficient information about the current state-of-affairs of the discussion, in order to minimize any further delay in the matter being resolved. Specifically, this might include a description of the matter being discussed and the responses received so far. An example of such a summary is presented in Figure 2. In this example, it is not sufficient to know that a plaque is being designed. Crucially, the wording of the plaque is under discussion and requires feedback from the thread participants. It is not difficult to appreciate the usefulness of such a summary to avoid writing responses to older, and hence irrelevant, emails. Accordingly, we envisage that the resulting summary to be not just indicative of the thread content but informative Borko (1975). 1. Here's the plaque info. 2. http://www.affordableawards.com/plaques/o rdecon.htm 3. I like the plaque, and aside for exchanging Dana's name for "Sally Slater" and ACM for "Ladies Auxiliary", the wording is nice. 4. …

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