ExtrAction

The Adobe email usage survey reports that people spend an average of 5 hours per day attending to their emails. The world has become fast-paced with vast amounts of important information being communicated via email. Specifically, requests and favors are communicated between workers in fast-paced businesses and workers who collaborate remotely. As a result, keeping track of items that need to be acted upon can become difficult without good organization habits.

To enable our project vision, we, the ExtrAction team, built a system that is able to detect action items present in a given email and then summarize them appropriately. We approached these two actions using two steps using two core NLP tasks: text classification and text summarization. Text classification is used to determine which sentences contain action items and then text summarization is used to make a succinct summary of each action item. 

The end result: ExtrAction, a Chrome Extension that uses natural language processing to quickly summarize email action items into easy-to-use to-do lists.

Check out our website here to see who we are and more on how we created a solution.