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Record W4408891216 · doi:10.1108/mip-04-2024-0252

Classifying an incoming customer message into spam versus ham

2025· article· en· W4408891216 on OpenAlex
Vivek Astvansh

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueMarketing Intelligence & Planning · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSpam and Phishing Detection
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBusinessComputer scienceMarketingAdvertising

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Purpose Customers often communicate with a company by sending it emails, filling out the “contact us” form on the company’s website, and posting messages on social media platforms. Unfortunately, a substantial part of these incoming customer messages can be spam. Whether an email is authentic (i.e. ham) or spam is specific to the company. Consequently, commercial spam classifiers (e.g. the one Microsoft Outlook uses) do not work well. A machine learning-based spam classifier can solve this problem. Design/methodology/approach I used a large dataset from a publicly traded retailer in the United States to test 27 TF-IDF-based and six word embedding-based binary classifiers. Findings I found that RoBERTa – a sophisticated embedding-based classifier – provided the lowest false positive rate of 5.31%. However, its rival classifier – XLNet – offered marginally superior (92%) balanced accuracy, relative to RoBERTa’s 91%. To enhance the use of the models by other organizations and academics, I offer supplemental models trained on only external datasets and a combination of internal and external datasets. Research limitations/implications The manuscript contributes by applying a broad set of existing machine learning models to solve a real problem for a real company. Practical implications I publish my code (via the journal), which other companies and researchers can use. Originality/value The manuscript is original in comparing a broad range of machine learning classifiers on real data from a real company.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.913
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.324
Teacher spread0.290 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it