Multilingual Email Zoning

The segmentation of emails into functional zones (also dubbed email zoning) is a relevant preprocessing step for most NLP tasks that deal with emails. However, and despite the multilingual character of emails and their applications, previous literature regarding email zoning corpora and systems was developed essentially for English. In this paper, we analyse the existing email zoning corpora and propose a new multilingual benchmark composed of 635 emails in Portuguese, Spanish and French. Moreover, we introduce OKAPI, the first multilingual email segmentation model based on a language-agnostic sentence encoder. Besides generalizing well for unseen languages, our model is competitive with current English benchmarks, and reached new state-of-the-art performances for domain adaptation tasks in English.