Requests and Commitments in Email are More Complex Than You Think: Eight Reasons to be Cautious

Abstract

Many workplace tasks are managed through email communication, involving the exchange of requests and commitments. Our aim is to build a tool that can automatically identify and manage such requests and commitments. A detailed analysis of real data, however, reveals a range of interesting edge cases that make even human annotation of training data difficult. In this paper, as an important step in the development of annotation guidelines for wider use in the growing email processing community, we identify eight categories of problematic data and propose how they should be handled in annotation and extraction tasks. 1