A Dataset for Anaphora Analysis in F rench Emails (2020)

Abstract: In 2019, about 293 billion emails were sent worldwide every day. They are a valuable source of information and knowledge for professionals. Since the 90’s, many studies have been done on emails and have highlighted the need for resources regarding numerous NLP tasks. Due to the lack of available resources for French, very few studies on emails have been conducted. Anaphora resolution in emails is an unexplored area, annotated resources are needed, at least to answer a first question: Does email communication have specifics that must be addressed to tackle the anaphora resolution task? In order to answer this question 1) we build a French emails corpus composed of 100 anonymized professional threads and make it available freely for scientific exploitation. 2) we provide annotations of anaphoric links in the email collection.

## introduction emails significantly increase the extent of communications in companies. in 2019, about 293 billion emails were sent worldwide every day. they are of great interest for professionals as they represent a valuable source of information and knowledge. natural language processing (nlp) techniques are commonly used for email analysis, to generate a history of the knowledge they convey @xcite , to retrieve redundant problem solving elements @xcite , or to identify tasks in order to help the user manage its time @xcite . many studies have been conducted on emails since the late 1990s, especially for the analysis of the english language, thanks to the publicly available enron corpus (250 000 emails sent or received by 87,000 employees of enron) @xcite . our review of french corpora reveals that only one collection of emails is available, which is a subset of the easy evaluation package (provided as part of the evaluation campaign for parsers of french, containing 2,250 anonymised personal emails @xcite ). given this lack of email corpora for the french language, recent works on french emails needed to create their own corpora (kalitvianski, 2018), however, similarly to the easy corpus, the corpora resulting from these works are not freely available to the research community, therefore comparing systems is still unfeasible, as recently highlighted by @xcite . anaphora and coreference resolution are core components of the nlp field. these tasks aim to detect and resolve repeated mentions of the same entities in a given document. many nlp tasks rely on the ability to resolve entities efficiently and could be prominently improved by using robust automatic strategies of anaphora and coreference resolution. in order to design suitable strategies dealing with a natural language phenomenon, one would require to analyse a sufficient number of occurrences of the said phenomenon. several studies on annotating french texts with anaphoric links have been conducted @xcite @xcite , resulting in a few available corpora. the texts covered in these corpora are of various genres and natures, nonetheless, emails are part of none of these datasets. in order to capture the characteristics of referring expressions in this particular kind of discourse (cf. section 3.1), we undertook the process of manually marking the occurrences of each type of anaphora that we considered relevant to the needs of typical nlp issues (cf. section 3.5) in a collection of anonymized professional french emails. our work leads to the following contributions: making available the first free french email corpus for scientific exploitation; providing annotations for the anaphora discourse phenomenon in french emails; giving a first quantitative overview of anaphora and coreference in emails. in this paper, we describe the dataset and its anonymization process (cf. section 2), then, we focus on anaphora and coreference annotation (cf. section 3). finally, we describe the annotated corpus and our future works (cf. section 5). ## dataset as for @xcite , our dataset is made of french professional emails which were requested from individual email authors on the basis of a volunteer act. in our case, authors are employees of a company that wished to remain anonymous. the corpus consists of 100 threads made of 314 emails (7163 words), out of mailing lists, exchanged between june and september 2017. ## anaphora annotation corpora with annotated anaphoric links are essential in nlp and in linguistics. large sets of annotations give the opportunity to study the anaphora phenomenon. allowing to craft rule-based systems (manually or automatically generated rules) and machine learning models. annotated corpora also allow the evaluation of those systems. the first goal of this study is to address the scarcity of french resources for anaphora study, especially ones containing emails texts @xcite . we aim to do so by making available the first free french email corpus with anaphoric links annotations. this work results in a relatively small dataset primarily designed for analysis and evaluation purposes, and represents, in our opinion, a useful starting point @xcite . this will allow us to undertake experiments and comparisons to highlight the singularity of automatic anaphora resolution in the email genre (cf. section 3.1). and thus, serve as a foundation for designing a rule-based resolution system that takes into account the writing conventions observed in this kind of texts. two large french corpora are annotated with coreference and anaphoric links. ancor @xcite ) contains a collection of spoken french transcriptions taken from sociolinguistic interviews. democrat's corpus is the most recent resource, annotated with coreferential information @xcite . interestingly, the authors took into account coreference chains in the annotation process. in democrat, the selection of texts was done in a way that helps capture the variations of the coreference phenomenon across text genres and eras. nonetheless, emails are not considered in these corpora. in section 4, a set of methodological choices is compared to those of larger-scale projects ; ancor @xcite , arrau @xcite and ontonotes corpora @xcite . in the following section, we discuss the specificity of annotating anaphoric links in the context of emails (cf. section 3.1), then describe our annotation protocol and the typology used (cf. section 3.3)). ## conclusion the detection and resolution of anaphoricity on french emails is an unexplored area that is essential to nlp systems applied to electronic communication. in this paper, we highlight the necessity of building annotated emails corpora. we introduce a small dataset of french emails annotated with anaphoric relations which will be freely distributed. the purpose of the dataset is to make possible the analysis of anaphora's behaviour in an email setting and to serve as a foundation for resolution systems taking into account the writing conventions in this kind of texts. an overview of the distribution of anaphora types in emails gives pointers regarding the challenging aspects of the forthcoming resolution task. we begin by listing the singularities of annotating anaphoric links in emails, then we present the annotation scheme used to deal with special cases and external antecedents. the paper is concluded by comparing important aspects of anaphora annotations to other larger-scale corpora.