Mercure: Towards an Automatic E-mail Follow-up System

Abstract

This paper discusses the design and the approach we have developed in order to deal effectively with customer e-mails sent to a corporation. We first present the current state of the art and then make the point that natural language tools are needed in order to deal effectively with the rather informal style encountered in the e-mails. In our project, called Mercure, we have explored three complementary approaches: classification, case-based reasoning and question-answering.