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Comparing Manual Text Patterns and Machine Learning for Classification of E-Mails for Automatic Answering by a Government Agency

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Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6609))

Abstract

E-mails to government institutions as well as to large companies may contain a large proportion of queries that can be answered in a uniform way. We analysed and manually annotated 4,404 e-mails from citizens to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, and compared two methods for detecting answerable e-mails: manually-created text patterns (rule-based) and machine learning-based methods. We found that the text pattern-based method gave much higher precision at 89 percent than the machine learning-based method that gave only 63 percent precision. The recall was slightly higher (66 percent) for the machine learning-based methods than for the text patterns (47 percent). We also found that 23 percent of the total e-mail flow was processed by the automatic e-mail answering system.

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Dalianis, H., Sjöbergh, J., Sneiders, E. (2011). Comparing Manual Text Patterns and Machine Learning for Classification of E-Mails for Automatic Answering by a Government Agency. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6609. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19437-5_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19437-5_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-19436-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19437-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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