E-mail classification with machine learning and word embeddings for improved customer support

Classifying e-mails into distinct labels can have a great impact on customer support. By using machine learning to label e-mails, the system can set up queues containing e-mails of a specific category. This enables support personnel to handle request quicker and more easily by selecting a queue that match their expertise. This study aims to improve a manually defined rule-based algorithm, currently implemented at a large telecom company, by using machine learning. The proposed model should have higher F1-score and classification rate. Integrating or migrating from a manually defined rule-based model to a machine learning model should also reduce the administrative and maintenance work. It should also make the model more flexible. By using the frameworks, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn and Gensim, the authors conduct a number of experiments to test the performance of several common machine learning algorithms, text-representations, word embeddings to investigate how they work together. A long short-term memory network showed best classification performance with an F1-score of 0.91. The authors conclude that long short-term memory networks outperform other non-sequential models such as support vector machines and AdaBoost when predicting labels for e-mails. Further, the study also presents a Web-based interface that were implemented around the LSTM network, which can classify e-mails into 33 different labels. © 2020, The Author(s).Open access