ASK Mail: An Intelligent Mailer for Retrieving and Organizing E-mail based on a Thesaurus

摘要

This paper presents an architectural overview of the mailing support system, called ASK mail. ASK mail has been developing as an intelligent mailer. This system provides the functions to retrieve and organize a collection of E-mail based on a thesaurus. There is a requirement to reduce workloads for manipulating E-mail, e.g., retrieving appropriate E-mail, showing relationships among them, etc. ASK mail has two ways to seek E-mail, which are searching and browsing. Appropriate E-mail messages are retrieved in searching, which satisfy information needs specified in terms of keywords. In addition to this, a thesaurus is provided for improving the efficiency of answer sets. On the other hand, a collection of threaded E-mail is browsed, in which messages are related to each other based on messages and their header lines. Furthermore, this thesaurus is used for classifying E-mail, and for computing the importance of received E-mail. In order to reduce workloads, ASK mail provides several kinds of mechanisms for supporting decisions to handle E-mail, e.g., retrieving, threading, and maintaining them.