Patent ID: 7788327

Claim:
An email preparation assisting device for assisting a sender of an email prepare a new email message to a recipient, comprising: a non transient computer readable medium having embedded therein: a term extraction member for extracting a term from email messages of a communications session between the recipient and the sender, the email messages including email messages sent to the recipient and email messages received from the recipient; a term usage frequency calculation member for calculating a usage frequency of each term in the email messages of the communication session that was extracted by the term extraction member; and a human-relations information producing member that determines a human relationship between the sender and the recipient using a term association list and the usage frequencies of the extracted terms, in which each term in the term association list is associated with human-relations basic information defined by at least one of measures of a senior-junior degree, a friendliness degree, and a business degree; wherein when a new communications session is performed with the recipient, the term usage frequency calculation member calculates a usage frequency, in an email message of the new communications session, of each term extracted by the term extraction member from the email message, and adds the calculation result to the usage frequency of the term thus far; and the human-relations information producing member (a) uses the term association list to perform: i) a first weighting operation where the human-relations basic information associated with the term extracted by the term extraction member from the email messages sent to the recipient is weighted with the calculated usage frequency of the term, and ii) a second weighting operation where human-relations basic information associated with the term extracted by the term extraction member from the email messages received from the recipient is weighted with the calculated usage frequency of the term, and (b) produces human-relations information of the senior-junior degree obtained from a difference between the results of the first and second weighting operations.