The case-based reasoning approach to email response consists of re- using past messages to synthesize new responses to incoming requests. This task presents various challenges due to the nature of the messages: Textual de- scriptions, multiple topics, heterogeneous content, variable text length and vary- ing recurrence of the statements. In this paper, we address the problem of de- termining which portions of past cases are reusable. Our scheme consists of identifying parts of a past message and declaring them variable, optional or re- usable. This formulation of case reuse corresponds, from an application point of view, to the dynamic creation of a response template from antecedent messages. We describe and compare two strategies for selecting the messages portions to be reused: Case grouping and condensation models. Our results indicate that the case grouping strategy is a better choice. We also describe some of our experi- ments for identifying variable parts, based on named entity extraction tech- niques.
['Luc Lamontagne', 'Guy Lapalme']
Textual Reuse for Email Response