This Email Could Save Your Life: Introducing the Task of Email Subject Line Generation

Rui Zhang, Joel Tetreault


Abstract
Given the overwhelming number of emails, an effective subject line becomes essential to better inform the recipient of the email’s content. In this paper, we propose and study the task of email subject line generation: automatically generating an email subject line from the email body. We create the first dataset for this task and find that email subject line generation favor extremely abstractive summary which differentiates it from news headline generation or news single document summarization. We then develop a novel deep learning method and compare it to several baselines as well as recent state-of-the-art text summarization systems. We also investigate the efficacy of several automatic metrics based on correlations with human judgments and propose a new automatic evaluation metric. Our system outperforms competitive baselines given both automatic and human evaluations. To our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the problem of effective email subject line generation.
Anthology ID:
P19-1043
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
446–456
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1043
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1043
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rui Zhang and Joel Tetreault. 2019. This Email Could Save Your Life: Introducing the Task of Email Subject Line Generation. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 446–456, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
This Email Could Save Your Life: Introducing the Task of Email Subject Line Generation (Zhang & Tetreault, ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1043.pdf
Supplementary:
 P19-1043.Supplementary.pdf
Code
 ryanzhumich/AESLC
Data
AESLC