Detection of question-answer pairs in email conversations

Abstract

While sentence extraction as an approach to summarization has been shown to work in documents of certain genres, because of the conversational nature of email communication where utterances are made in relation to one made previously, sentence extraction may not capture the necessary segments of dialogue that would make a summary coherent. In this paper, we present our work on the detection of question-answer pairs in an email conversation for the task of email summarization. We show that various features based on the structure of email-threads can be used to improve upon lexical similarity of discourse segments for question-answer pairing.