This Email Could Save Your Life: Introducing the Task of Email Subject Line Generation
Table 2: Annotated Enron Subject Line Corpus compared with other datasets.
['Dataset', 'domain', 'docs (train/val/test)', 'avg doc words', 'avg summary words']
There have been several research tracks around email usage. While much effort has been focused on email summarization Muresan et al. In this paper, we propose the task of Subject Line Generation (SLG): automatically producing email subjects given the email body. While this is similar to email summarization, the two tasks serve different purposes in the process of email composition and consumption. A subject line is required when the sender writes the email, while a summary is more useful for long emails to benefit the recipient. An automatically generated email subject can also be used for downstream applications such as email triaging to help people manage emails more efficiently. Therefore, we believe this task can also benefit other highly abstractive summarization such as generating section titles for long documents to improve reading comprehension speed and accuracy. We use Enron because it can be released to the public and it contains business and personal type emails for which the subject line is already well-defined and useful. While being similar to news headline generation Rush et al.