Identifying Business Tasks and Commitments from Email and Chat Conversations

Abstract

Case management applications and, more generally, people-centric processes involve the definition, resolution and communication of commitments for tasks over channels such as chat and email. Identifying and tracking tasks and commitments can help in streamlining the collaborative work in business environments. However, doing so proves challenging due to the syntactical, grammatical, and structural incompleteness of human conversations over chat and email channels. We present a novel approach to automatically identify tasks and commitment creation, delegation, completion, and cancellation in email and chat conversations, based on techniques from natural language processing and machine learning domains. We discover tasks and related parameters from the text of conversations, identify when a commitment to a task emerges and find the state changes of a commitment based features extracted from the text of the conversations. We have developed a prototype and evaluated our approach using real-world chat and email datasets. Our experiments shows high precision for create class i.e., 90% in emails (Enron email corpus) and 80% in a real-world chat dataset and also provides promising results for discharge, delegate, and cancel classes.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 10, 2013
Accession Number
AD1142111

Entities

People

  • Anup K. Kalia
  • Claudio Bartolini
  • Hamid-reza Motahari-nezhad
  • Munindar P. Singh

Organizations

  • Hp
  • North Carolina State University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • C4I

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Agreements
  • Automata Theory
  • Cancellation
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Languages
  • Computer Science
  • Language
  • Life Cycles
  • Linguistics
  • Machine Learning
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Languages
  • Network Science
  • Ontologies
  • Supervised Machine Learning
  • United States
  • Unsupervised Machine Learning

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Defense Acquisition Program Management

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks