Suggest Recipients in Gmail

[Mark Dredze]

New lab in gmail.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-in-labs-suggest-more-recipients.html

The idea is straight from several research papers:
- CC Prediction with Graphical Models. Chris Pal and Andrew McCallum. Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS), 2006
- Ramnath Balasubramanyan, Vitor R. Carvalho and  William W. Cohen. Cut Once: Recipient Recommendation and Leak Detection in Action. AAAI-2008 EMAIL Workshop, Chicago, Jul 2008

It is nice to see research make it into products.

Mark

[Andrew....@csiro.au]

Great stuff. Just one point of clarification: the gmail addition seems to only look at header information to suggest additional recipients. I wonder if they'll add content-related features for predicting recipients - that truly would be very exciting from an NLP point of view. Or does the labs feature already look at content? I'm only working from the blog post, which seems to suggest that it only uses information about past recipient groups to predict additional recipients.

Cheers,
Andrew
________________________________________
From: email-r...@googlegroups.com [email-r...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mark Dredze [ma...@dredze.com]
Sent: Monday, 20 April 2009 1:00 PM
To: email-research
Subject: [email-research] Suggest Recipients in Gmail

[Mark Dredze]

My guess would be it uses header information only. It is looking for groups that are typically grouped together and suggesting contacts that are not in the current email that are in a related group.

Mark

[Vitor R. Carvalho]

Yep. That's what it looks like from the descriptions (even though I haven't seen any suggestion in my client yet).

On a related note, I've read a very interesting "email" paper from WWW-09 that I think will interest many of you. Here's the link:
http://www2009.eprints.org/72/1/p711.pdf
Behavioral Profiles for Advanced Email Features
Thomas Karagiannis and Milan Vojnovic

Cheers,
Vitor

--
Vitor R. Carvalho
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~vitor

[Mark Dredze]

Along a related line, I have a paper in IJCAI this year about work we did at Google with Gmail this past summer.
Mark Dredze, Bill N. Schilit, Peter Norvig. Suggesting Email View Filters for Triage and Search. Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2009.

There are much more detailed user survey results in my thesis and the associated appendix:
Mark Dredze. Intelligent Email: Aiding Users with AI. PhD Thesis, Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2009.

Both are on my website: www.dredze.com

Best,
Mark