Exploiting E-mail structure to improve summarization

For this thesis, I designed and implemented a system to summarize e-mail messages. The system exploits two aspects of e-mail, thread reply chains and commonly-found features, to generate summaries. The system uses existing software designed to summarize single text documents. Such software typically performs best on well-authored, formal documents. E-mail messages, however, are typically neither well-authored, nor formal. As a result, existing summarization software typically gives a poor summary of e-mail messages. To remedy this poor performance, the system's approach preprocesses e-mail messages to synthesize new input to this software, so that it will output more useful summaries of e-mail. This pre-processing involves a lightweight, heuristics-based approach to filtering e-mail to remove e-mail signatures, header fields, and quoted parent messages. I also present a heuristics-based approach to identifying and reporting names, dates, and companies found in e-mail messages. Lastly, I discuss conclusions from a pilot user study of my summarization system, and conclude with areas for further investigation.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Lam, Derek Scott, 1979-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Steven L. Rohall and Chris Schmandt.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16846

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16846