Using Question-Answer Pairs in Extractive Summarization of Email Conversations

While sentence extraction as an approach to summarization has been shown to work in documents of certain genres, because of the conversational nature of email communication, sentence extraction may not result in a coherent summary. In this paper, we present our work on augmenting extractive summaries of threads of email conversations with automatically detected question-answer pairs. We compare various appraoches to integrating questionanswer pairs in the extractive summaries, and show that their use improves the quality of email summaries. We also describe the email summarization interface we have developed that allows users to summarize email conversations from email clients such as Mircosoft Outlook.