Detection of imperative and declarative question–answer pairs in email conversations

Abstract

Question–answer pairs extracted from email threads are valuable in constructing summaries of the content of the thread, as well as in providing data for semantic-based assistance with email. Previous work dedicated to extracting question–answer pairs from email threads considers only questions in interrogative form. We extend the scope of question and answer detection and pairing to encompass questions in imperative and declarative forms, and to operate at sentence-level fidelity. Building on prior work, our methods are based on learned models over a set of features that include the content, context, and structure of email threads. On multiple benchmark email corpora, we show that our methods balance precision and recall in extracting question–answer pairs, while maintaining a modest computation time.