Automatic email response suggestion for support departments within a university

Abstract

Background. Office of Academic Affairs (OAA), Office of Student Life (OSL) and Information Technology Helpdesk (ITD) are support functions within a university which receives hundreds of email messages on the daily basis. A large percentage of emails received by these departments are frequent and commonly used queries or request for information. Responding to every query by manually typing is a tedious and time consuming task and an automated approach for email response suggestion can save lot of time. Methods.We propose an application and solution approach for automatically generating and suggesting short email responses to support queries in a university environment. Our proposed solution can be used as one tap or one click solution for responding to various types of queries raised by faculty members and students in a university. We create a dataset for the application domain and make it publicly available. We apply a machine learning framework for classifying emails into categories such as office of academic affairs or information technology department. We apply a machine learning based classification approach for sub-category level classification also. We apply text pre-processing techniques, feature selection, support vector machine and naïve naive classifiers. We present an approach to overcome various natural language processing based challenges in the text. Results.We conduct a series of experiments and evaluate the approach using confusion matrix and accuracy based metrics. We study the discriminatory power of features and compare their relevance for the classification task. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed approach is effective. We conclude from our experiments that discriminatory features can be extracted from the text within our specific domain and automatic email response suggestion can be accurately created using machine learning algorithms and framework. We experiment with two different learning algorithms and observe that SVM outperforms Naïve Bayes. We achieve a classification accuracy of above $85\%$ for all the classes and sub-classes. Discussion. Our experiments on email response suggestion are conducted on a corpus consists of short and frequent emails by a university function but the proposed approach and techniques can be generalized to other domains also. We observe that different classifiers give different results and there is a significant difference in the predictive power of features. Background. Office of Academic Affairs (OAA), Office of Student Life (OSL) and Information Technology Helpdesk (ITD) are support functions within a university which receives hundreds of email messages on the daily basis. A large percentage of emails received by these departments are frequent and commonly used queries or request for information. Responding to every query by manually typing is a tedious and time consuming task and an automated approach for email response suggestion can save lot of time. Methods. We propose an application and solution approach for automatically generating an...

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