Email pragmatics and automatic classification: A study in the organizational context

Abstract

This paper presents a two‐phased research project aiming to improve email triage for public administration managers. The first phase developed a typology of email classification patterns through a qualitative study involving 34 participants. Inspired by the fields of pragmatics and speech act theory, this typology comprising four top level categories and 13 subcategories represents the typical email triage behaviors of managers in an organizational context. The second study phase was conducted on a corpus of 1,703 messages using email samples of two managers. Using the k‐NN (k‐nearest neighbor) algorithm, statistical treatments automatically classified the email according to lexical and nonlexical features representative of managers' triage patterns. The automatic classification of email according to the lexicon of the messages was found to be substantially more efficient when k = 2 and n = 2,000. For four categories, the average recall rate was 94.32%, the average precision rate was 94.50%, and the accuracy rate was 94.54%. For 13 categories, the average recall rate was 91.09%, the average precision rate was 84.18%, and the accuracy rate was 88.70%. It appears that a message's nonlexical features are also deeply influenced by email pragmatics. Features related to the recipient and the sender were the most relevant for characterizing email.

Filing, piling, and everything in between: The dynamics of E‐mail inbox management

“…Rapid decision making is required to classify the messages and handle those that can or have to be taken care of immediately while carefully marking and/or filing those that require complex and often long-term handling (Bellotti, Ducheneaut, Howard, Smith, & Grinter, 2005). Efforts to improve the effectiveness of e-mail triage are ongoing (e.g., Alberts & Forest, 2012).…”

Challenges of information system use by knowledge workers: The email productivity paradox

“…For instance, email systems do not allow employees to organize the messages according to different priority levels, as shown by Dabbish et al (2005) or organize messages to effectively plan their tasks (Whittaker and Sidner, 1996; Siu et al, 2006; Whittaker et al, 2006). In order to effectively manage their messages, employees implement various workarounds practices indicative of their real needs and their strong pragmatic requirements (Alberts & Forest, 2012).…”

MinEMail

“…These actions can range from detecting messages that need a reply [12], to be saved [11], or to have an attachment sent [4]. More personalized tasks have been modeled for managers in enterprise [5]. This work suggests that attaching and identifying completion activities to emails is reasonable and predictable, and we build upon this work.…”