Email pragmatics and automatic classification: A study in the organizational context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents a two‐phased research project aiming to improve email triage for public administration managers. The first phase developed a typology of email classification patterns through a qualitative study involving 34 participants. Inspired by the fields of pragmatics and speech act theory, this typology comprising four top level categories and 13 subcategories represents the typical email triage behaviors of managers in an organizational context. The second study phase was conducted on a corpus of 1,703 messages using email samples of two managers. Using the k‐NN (k‐nearest neighbor) algorithm, statistical treatments automatically classified the email according to lexical and nonlexical features representative of managers' triage patterns. The automatic classification of email according to the lexicon of the messages was found to be substantially more efficient when k = 2 and n = 2,000. For four categories, the average recall rate was 94.32%, the average precision rate was 94.50%, and the accuracy rate was 94.54%. For 13 categories, the average recall rate was 91.09%, the average precision rate was 84.18%, and the accuracy rate was 88.70%. It appears that a message's nonlexical features are also deeply influenced by email pragmatics. Features related to the recipient and the sender were the most relevant for characterizing email.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.081 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".