This Email Could Save Your Life: Introducing the Task of Email Subject Line Generation
This work addresses the challenge of managing overwhelming email volumes for users by generating effective subject lines, but it is incremental as it builds on existing text summarization techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically generating email subject lines from email bodies, creating the first dataset for this task and showing that it requires highly abstractive summaries distinct from news headline generation. Their novel deep learning method outperforms competitive baselines in both automatic and human evaluations.
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.