Inferring Organizational Titles in Online Communication

There is increasing interest in the storage, retrieval, and analysis of email communications. One active area of research focuses on the inference of properties of the underlying social network giving rise to the email communications[1, 2]. Email communication between individuals implies some type of relationship, whether it is formal, such as a manager-employee relationship, or informal, such as friendship relationships. Understanding the nature of these observed relationships can be problematic given there is a shared context among the individuals that isn’t necessarily communicated. This provides a challenge for analysts that wish to explore and understand email archives for legal or historical research In this abstract, we focus on a specific subproblem of identifying the hierarchy of a social network in an email archive. In particular, we focus on and define the problem of inferring a formal reflection of an organizational hierarchy, the formal title of an individual, within the underlying social network. We present a new dataset, to use in conjunction with the original Enron dataset, for studying the formal organizational structure underlying an email archive. We also provide preliminary results from the classification of individuals to broad titles in the organization, relying only on simple traffic statistics.