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<Paper uid="W04-3240">
  <Title>Learning to Classify Email into &amp;quot;Speech Acts&amp;quot;</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper we discuss using machine learning methods to classify email according to the intent of the sender. In particular, we classify emails according to an ontology of verbs (e.g., propose, commit, deliver) and nouns (e.g., information, meeting, task), which jointly describe the &amp;quot;email speech act&amp;quot; intended by the email sender. A method for accurate classification of email into such categories would have many potential benefits. For instance, it could be used to help an email user track the status of ongoing joint activities. Delegation and coordination of joint tasks is a time-consuming and error-prone activity, and the cost of errors is high: it is not uncommon that commitments are forgotten, deadlines are missed, and opportunities are wasted because of a failure to properly track, delegate, and prioritize subtasks. The classification methods we consider methods which could be used to partially automate this sort of activity tracking. A hypothetical example of an email assistant that works along these lines is shown in Figure 1.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Bill, Do you have any sample scheduling-related email we could use as data? -Steve Assistant announces: &amp;quot;new email request, priority unknown.&amp;quot; Sure, I'll put some together shortly. -Bill Assistant: &amp;quot;should I add this new commitment to your todo list?&amp;quot; Fred, can you collect the msgs from the CSPACE corpora tagged w/ the &amp;quot;meeting&amp;quot; noun, ASAP? -Bill Assistant: notices outgoing request, may take action if no answer is received promptly.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Yes, I can get to that in the next few days. Is next Monday ok? -Fred Assistant: notices incoming commitment. &amp;quot;Should I send Fred a reminder on Monday?&amp;quot; Figure 1 - Dialog with a hypothetical email assistant that automatically detects email speech acts. Dashed boxes indicate outgoing messages. (Messages have been edited for space and anonymity.)</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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