Redundant Email Elimination

Participants: LAN Jiang, NGUYEN The Huy, VO Phan Chuong, WU Xiandan, Raymond KWOK, Limsoon WONG.

Objective

With the advent of the Internet more and more people are communicating in electronic form such as via email messages, bulletin board systems and USENET groups. With this increased use of electronic communications, there has also become a greater degree of redundant messaging. Not only is it irritating for a person to find multiple repeated messages in their email folder, but it is a time consuming process for the person to read through all the messages and sort the relevant information from redundant messages. Thus we would like to develop an efficient and effective method and system to identify and eliminate such redundant messages.

History

The idea for this project was described by Raymond Kwok to Limsoon Wong in January 2000. Several possible embodiments of this idea were then sketched by Limsoon in April 2000. Patents were then applied for October 2000, and granted in April 2005 in Europe and May 2005 in Singapore.

Four different prototypes were then built over two semesters in 2006/7 by Lan Jiang, Nguyan The Huy, Vo Phan Chuong, and Wu Xiandan as their honour-year projects in NUS School of Computing. Comments on these prototypes are found below.

The "Best Redundant Email Elimination Project" award was won by Wu Xiandan, for having built the prototype with (a) the highest degree of robustness, sensitivity, and precision; and (b) a very decent GUI; as well as demonstrating the best professional conduct during the project.

Publications

Chong-See Kwok, Limsoon Wong. A method for eliminating redundant email messages. European Patent No. 1327192, 20 April 2005. PDF
Chong-See Kwok, Limsoon Wong. A method for eliminating redundant email messages. Singapore Patent No. 95931 [WO 00/33981], 31 May 2005. PDF

Prototypes

Wu Xiandan's prototype and report
Wu's approach is closest to that described in the patents, which is based on sequence alignment. But he has added a number of practical innovations including robust interfaces to email systems, excellent GUI, handling of attachments, as well as algorithmic improvements for efficiency and for increased sensitivity and precision. However, his prototype runs somewhat slower than others.
Vo Phan Chuong's prototype and report
Vo's approach is also very close to that described in the patents. However, the prototype and testing are not as extensive as Wu's.
Nguyen The Huy's prototype and report
Nguyen's approach is quite different from that described in the patents. He uses a "fingerprint" method to identify related emails that can made each other redundant. His prototype runs really fast and worked well on many email messages. However, it has more false negative problems on short messages and more false positive problems on long messages. His prototype is text-based.
Lan Jiang's prototype, poster, and report
Lan's approach is also quite different from that described in the patents. He uses subsequence matching, which is a lot faster than the string alignment based algorithm in the patents. This works well in typical cases, but has more false positives on short messages. Lan has also built a nice GUI and a fully functional email system.

Last updated: 3/5/07, Limsoon Wong.