Multilingual email zoning

Abstract

Jardim, B., Rei, R., & Almeida, M. S. C. (2021). Multilingual email zoning. In EACL 2021 - 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop (pp. 88-95). (EACL 2021 - 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). --------------------------- Funding Information: This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 873904. Funding Information: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 873904. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Association for Computational LinguisticsThe segmentation of emails into functional zones (also dubbed email zoning) is a relevant preprocessing step for most NLP tasks that deal with emails. However, despite the multilingual character of emails and their applications, previous literature regarding email zoning corpora and systems was developed essentially for English. In this paper, we analyse the existing email zoning corpora and propose a new multilingual benchmark composed of 625 emails in Portuguese, Spanish and French. Moreover, we introduce OKAPI, the first multilingual email segmentation model based on a language agnostic sentence encoder. Besides generalizing well for unseen languages, our model is competitive with current English benchmarks, and reached new state-of-the-art performances for domain adaptation tasks in English.publishersversionpublishe