Context-Aware Intent Identification in Email Conversations

Wei Wang, Saghar Hosseini, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Paul N. Bennett, Chris Quirk

Abstract: Email continues to be one of the most important means of online communication. People spend a significant amount of time sending, reading, searching and responding to email in order to manage tasks, exchange information, etc. In this paper, we study intent identification in workplace email. We use a large scale publicly available email dataset to characterize intents in enterprise email and propose methods for improving intent identification in email conversations. Previous work focused on classifying email messages into broad topical categories or detecting sentences that contain action items or follow certain speech acts. In this work, we focus on sentence-level intent identification and study how incorporating more context (such as the full message body and other metadata) could improve the performance of the intent identification models. We experiment with several models for leveraging context including both classical machine learning and deep learning approaches. We show that modeling the interaction between sentence and context can significantly improve the performance.