Analyzing an email collection using formal concept analysis

Abstract

We demonstrate the use of a data analysis technique called formal concept analysis (FCA) to explore information stored in a set of email documents. The user extends a pre-defined taxonomy of classifiers, designed to extract information from email documents with her own specialized classifiers. The classifiers extract information both from (i) the email headers providing structured information such as the date received, from:, to: and cc: lists, (ii) the email body containing free English text, and (iii) conjunctions of the two sources.