Automated email activity management: an unsupervised learning approach

ABSTRACT

Many structured activities are managed by email. For instance, a consumer purchasing an item from an e-commerce vendor may receive a message confirming the order, a warning of a delay, and then a shipment notification. Existing email clients do not understand this structure, forcing users to manage their activities by sifting through lists of messages. As a first step to developing email applications that provide high-level support for structured activities, we consider the problem of automatically learning an activity's structure. We formalize activities as finite-state automata, where states correspond to the status of the process, and transitions represent messages sent between participants. We propose several unsupervised machine learning algorithms in this context, and evaluate them on a collection of e-commerce email.

REFERENCES

• 1: Victoria Bellotti , Brinda Dalal , Nathaniel Good , Peter Flynn , Daniel G. Bobrow , Nicolas Ducheneaut, What a to-do: studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.735-742, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985785]
• 2: Victoria Bellotti , Nicolas Ducheneaut , Mark Howard , Ian Smith, Taking email to task: the design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642672]
• 3: R. Carrasco. Accurate computation of the relative entropy between stochastic regular grammars. Theoretical Informatics and Applications, 31(5), 1997.
• 4: Nicolas Ducheneaut , Victoria Bellotti, E-mail as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management, interactions, v.8 n.5, p.30-38, Sept./Oct. 2001 [doi>10.1145/382899.383305]
• 5: E. Gold. Grammar identification in the limit. Information and Control, 10(5), 1967.
• 6: Jacek Gwizdka, Reinventing the inbox: supporting the management of pending tasks in email, CHI '02 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/506443.506476]
• 7: N. Kushmerick and A. Heß. Learning to attach semantic metadata to web services. In Proc. Int. Semantic Web Conf., 2003.
• 8: Pattie Maes, Agents that reduce work and information overload, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.7, p.30-40, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/176789.176792]
• 9: Kenricj Mock, An experimental framework for email categorization and management, Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.392-393, September 2001, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/383952.384033]
• 10: Steven L. Rohall , Dan Gruen , Paul Moody , Martin Wattenberg , Mia Stern , Bernard Kerr , Bob Stachel , Kushal Dave , Robert Armes , Eric Wilcox, ReMail: a reinvented email prototype, CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985921.985938]
• 11: M. Sahami, S. Dumais, D. Heckerman, and E. Horvitz. A Bayesian approach to filtering junk e-mail. In Proc. AAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization, 1998.
• 12: Richard Segal , Jeffrey O. Kephart, Incremental Learning in SwiftFile, Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning, p.863-870, June 29-July 02, 2000
• 13: Franck Thollard , Pierre Dupont , Colin de la Higuera, Probabilistic DFA Inference using Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Minimality, Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning, p.975-982, June 29-July 02, 2000
• 14: W. M. P. van der Aalst , B. F. van Dongen , J. Herbst , L. Maruster , G. Schimm , A. J. M. M. Weijters, Workflow mining: a survey of issues and approaches, Data & Knowledge Engineering, v.47 n.2, p.237-267, November 2003 [doi>10.1016/S0169-023X(03)00066-1]
• 15: Steve Whittaker , Candace Sidner, Email overload: exploring personal information management of email, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.276-283, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238530]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Electronic mail

Keywords:
activity management, automaton induction, clustering, email, machine learning, text classification