Section: Application Domains

Processing e-mails: Kwaga

Participants : Laurence Danlos, Benoît Sagot, Frédéric Meunier, Vanessa Combet.

Kwaga is an online service available for different webmails and email clients via an asynchronous plugin. Its aim is to enrich (and not to replace) existing email applications, helping users to decide which emails they should read and in which order, and providing additional features related to emails such as incoming email categorization, priority level assignment and automatic calendar events creation based on the content of the email, and others.

Such a service necessarily relies on NLP tools and techniques. In its first version, Kwaga uses the Unitex tool, developed at the University of Marne-la-Vallée. The Sx Pipe procesing chain, developed at Alpage, is another option that has several comparative advantages: it has been decided to grant Sx Pipe a stability and technical characteristics that are suitable for industrial use, and to have Kwaga benefit from this technology.

To achieve this goal, an ARITT contract was signed between Alpage and the Kwaga company, that develops and distributes this service, with objectives and results that benefit to both sides:

• For Alpage, this allowed to (start and) integrate Sx Pipe within the UIMA standard, which is a common requirement from industrial partners. Moreover, linguistic information embedded in Sx Pipe has been extended for improving the quality of its results on Kwaga's domain, namely email corpora.

• For Kwaga, this allowed for a technology transfer of recent research outcomes. Replacing Unitex by Sx Pipe, which is more recent and based on the last advances in both computer science and linguistics, appears to be a reasonable and promising choice, that should be evaluated shortly.