2001 Presentations (Communicative Events)

GIST-IT: Summarizing Email Using Linguistic Knowledge and Machine

Klavans, Judith L.; Muresan, Smaranda; Tzoukermann, Evelyne

We present a system for the automatic extraction of salient information from email messages, thus providing the gist of their meaning. Dealing with email raises several challenges that we address in this paper: heterogeneous data in terms of length and topic. Our method combines shallow linguistic processing with machine learning to extract phrasal units that are representative of email content. The GIST-IT application is fully implemented and embedded in an active mailbox platform. Evaluation was performed over three machine learning paradigms.