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Characterizing and Predicting Enterprise Email Reply Behavior

Published: 07 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Email is still among the most popular online activities. People spend a significant amount of time sending, reading and responding to email in order to communicate with others, manage tasks and archive personal information. Most previous research on email is based on either relatively small data samples from user surveys and interviews, or on consumer email accounts such as those from Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. Much less has been published on how people interact with enterprise email even though it contains less automatically generated commercial email and involves more organizational behavior than is evident in personal accounts. In this paper, we extend previous work on predicting email reply behavior by looking at enterprise settings and considering more than dyadic communications. We characterize the influence of various factors such as email content and metadata, historical interaction features and temporal features on email reply behavior. We also develop models to predict whether a recipient will reply to an email and how long it will take to do so. Experiments with the publicly-available Avocado email collection show that our methods outperform all baselines with large gains. We also analyze the importance of different features on reply behavior predictions. Our findings provide new insights about how people interact with enterprise email and have implications for the design of the next generation of email clients.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGIR '17: Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
August 2017
1476 pages
ISBN:9781450350228
DOI:10.1145/3077136
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 August 2017

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  1. email reply behavior
  2. information overload
  3. user behavior modeling

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SIGIR '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 78 of 362 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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