METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR SUMMARIZING EMAILS AND EXTRACTING TASKS

• US 20170161372A1
• Filed: 12/04/2015
• Published: 06/08/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 12/04/2015
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Codeq, LLC
• Original Assignee: Codeq, LLC
• Inventors: FERNNDEZ, Paulo Malvar, BAKER, Douglas Dane, ABDUL-MAGEED, Muhammad, ALARCN, Rodrigo, SCHUELER, David, DeROSE, Steven
• Application Number:
  US14/959,331
• Publication Number:
  US 20170161372A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/334 Query execution G06F16/335 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/345 Summarisation for human users
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/35 Clustering; Classification
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/117 Tagging; Marking up details of markup languages G06F40/143; Designating a block; Setting of attributes style sheets, e.g. eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation [XSLT], G06F40/154
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/205 Parsing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/211 Syntactic parsing, e.g. based on context-free grammar [CFG] or unification grammars
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/268 Morphological analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/284 Lexical analysis, e.g. tokenisation or collocates
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/295 Named entity recognition
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/107 Computer-aided management of electronic mailing [e-mailing]

Abstract

The disclosed invention performs a set of operations on an email to analyze the text and generate a coherent summary. Email summaries are generated by applying a coherence layer after a ranking process. Analyzing how sentences relate to each other via discourse markers and other linguistic devices aids in enhancing coherence of the email summaries. Output summaries are more coherent and easier to understand because they mimic the flow of ideas contained in the original message instead of merely being a collection of extracted sentences. Tasks may also be extracted from the text of the email to assist users in keeping track of tasks that they receive via email.

Claims

1. A method for summarizing emails, comprising:

parsing, by an email zone identifier module, different zones in which an email is organized;

processing text within the email, the processing comprising;

tokenizing the text;

lemmatizing the text;

tagging the text with parts of speech;

analyzing syntactic dependencies within the text; and

extracting named entities;

classifying, by a speech act classifier module, each sentence of the text into one of a plurality of speech acts;

classifying, by a questions classifier module, sentences of the text that contain a question;

summarizing, by a conversational email summarizer module, the email into a compact and coherent summary, the summarizing comprising;

ranking each sentence in the text with an importance score, and adding sentences to an initial email summary that have an importance score surpassing a threshold; and

applying a set of post-processing rules to sentences in the initial email summary after ranking each sentence in the text to yield a final email summary; and

outputting the final email summary of the email.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising classifying, by an email type classifier, the email as either conversational email or botmail.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the different zones that are parsed for the email comprise a signature zone, a salutation zone, a body zone, and reply text.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein lemmatizing the text comprises removing inflectional endings of words in an email body zone and an earlier email zone, and returning the base or dictionary form of the words.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the speech acts that are classified for each sentence comprise one of a command/request, commitment, questions, statement, desire/need, or miscellaneous speech act.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the classifying, by the questions classifier module, the sentences of the text that contain a question, further comprises identifying a particular type of question within such sentences.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein ranking each sentence in the text is performed by a ranking linear regressor that assigns an importance score to each sentence in the text of a body zone of the email.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the set of post-processing rules comprises an anaphora rule that identifies a sentence in the initial email summary that contains an anaphoric pronoun in initial words of the identified sentence, and if such an anaphoric pronoun is present, adding a second sentence to the final email summary, the second sentence being a sentence that is immediately prior to the identified sentence in an email body zone of the email.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the set of post-processing rules comprises a discourse marker rule that identifies a sentence in the initial email summary that contains a discourse marker in initial words of the identified sentence, and if a discourse marker is present, adding a second sentence to the final email summary, the second sentence being a sentence that is immediately prior to the identified sentence in an email body zone of the email.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the set of post-processing rules comprises a comparative adjective rule that identifies a sentence in the initial email summary that contains a comparative adjective, and if a comparative adjective is present, adding a second sentence to the final email summary, the second sentence being a sentence that is immediately prior to the identified sentence in an email body zone of the email.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein the set of post-processing rules comprises a questions rule wherein if a question-containing sentence is not in the initial email summary, adding the question-containing sentence to the final summary.

12. A system for summarizing emails, the system comprising:

one or more processors,

memory having instructions stored thereon, which when executed by the one or more processors, cause the processors to perform the following actions;

parsing different zones in which an email is organized;

tokenizing text within the email;

lemmatizing the text;

tagging the text with parts of speech;

analyzing syntactic dependencies within the text;

extracting named entities from the text;

classifying each sentence of the text into one of a plurality of speech acts;

classifying sentences of the text that contain a question;

summarizing the email into a compact and coherent summary, the summarizing comprising;

ranking each sentence in the text with an importance score, and adding sentences to an initial email summary that have an importance score surpassing a threshold; and

applying a set of post-processing rules to sentences in the initial email summary after ranking each sentence in the text to yield a final email summary; and

outputting the final email summary of the email.

13. The system of claim 12, the processors further performing the action of classifying the email as either conversational email or botmail.

14. The system of claim 12, wherein the different zones that are parsed for the email comprise a signature zone, a salutation zone, a body zone, and reply text.

15. The system of claim 12, wherein lemmatizing the text comprises removing inflectional endings of words in an email body zone and an earlier email zone, and returning the base or dictionary form of the words.

16. The system of claim 12, wherein the speech acts that are classified for each sentence comprise one of a command/request, commitment, questions, statement, desire/need, or miscellaneous speech act.

17. The system of claim 12, wherein classifying the sentences of the text that contain a question further comprises identifying a particular type of question within such sentences.

18. The system of claim 12, wherein ranking each sentence in the text comprises assigning an importance score to each sentence in the text of a body zone of the email.

19. The system of claim 12, wherein the set of post-processing rules comprises an anaphora rule that identifies a sentence in the initial email summary that contains an anaphoric pronoun in initial words of the identified sentence, and if such an anaphoric pronoun is present, adding a second sentence to the final email summary, the second sentence being a sentence that is immediately prior to the identified sentence in an email body zone of the email.

20. The system of claim 12, wherein the set of post-processing rules comprises a discourse marker rule that identifies a sentence in the initial email summary that contains a discourse marker in initial words of the identified sentence, and if a discourse marker is present, adding a second sentence to the final email summary, the second sentence being a sentence that is immediately prior to the identified sentence in an email body zone of the email.

21. The system of claim 12, wherein the set of post-processing rules comprises a comparative adjective rule that identifies a sentence in the initial email summary that contains a comparative adjective, and if a comparative adjective is present, adding a second sentence to the final email summary, the second sentence being a sentence that is immediately prior to the identified sentence in an email body zone of the email.

22. The system of claim 12, wherein the set of post-processing rules comprises a questions rule wherein if a question-containing sentence is not in the initial email summary, adding the question-containing sentence to the final summary.