A corpus-based investigation of junk emails

Constantin Orasan; Ramesh Krishnamurthy

A corpus-based investigation of junk emails

Constantin Orasan, Ramesh Krishnamurthy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference output › Chapter

Abstract

Almost everyone who has an email account receives from time to time unwanted emails. These emails can be jokes from friends or commercial product offers from unknown people. In this paper we focus on these unwanted messages which try to promote a product or service, or to offer some “hot” business opportunities. These messages are called junk emails. Several methods to filter junk emails were proposed, but none considers the linguistic characteristics of junk emails. In this paper, we investigate the linguistic features of a corpus of junk emails, and try to decide if they constitute a distinct genre. Our corpus of junk emails was build from the messages received by the authors over a period of time. Initially, the corpus consisted of 1563, but after eliminating the duplications automatically we kept only 673 files, totalising just over 373,000 tokens. In order to decide if the junk emails constitute a different genre, a comparison with a corpus of leaflets extracted from BNC and with the whole BNC corpus is carried out. Several characteristics at the lexical and grammatical levels were identified.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceeding of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002)
Publisher	ELRA
Pages	1773-1780
Number of pages	8
ISBN (Print)	2-951740-80-8
Publication status	Published - Jun 2002
Event	3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - Las Palmas, Spain Duration: 29 May 2002 → 31 May 2002

Conference

Conference	3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
Country/Territory	Spain
City	Las Palmas
Period	29/05/02 → 31/05/02

Bibliographical note

3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2002), 29-30 May 2002, Las Palmas (ES). Published with the permission of ELRA. This paper was published within the proceedings of the LREC 2002 Conference. © 1998-2010 ELRA - European Language Resources Association. All rights reserved.

Keywords

email
unwanted emails
junk emails
linguistic features
lexic
grammatic

Access to Document

2002-LREC-113-junk-emails.pdf
3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2002), 29-30 May 2002, Las Palmas (ES). Published with the permission of ELRA. This paper was published within the proceedings of the LREC 2002 Conference. © 1998-2010 ELRA - European Language Resources Association. All rights reserved.
Accepted author manuscript, 79 KB

Cite this

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title = "A corpus-based investigation of junk emails",

abstract = "Almost everyone who has an email account receives from time to time unwanted emails. These emails can be jokes from friends or commercial product offers from unknown people. In this paper we focus on these unwanted messages which try to promote a product or service, or to offer some “hot” business opportunities. These messages are called junk emails. Several methods to filter junk emails were proposed, but none considers the linguistic characteristics of junk emails. In this paper, we investigate the linguistic features of a corpus of junk emails, and try to decide if they constitute a distinct genre. Our corpus of junk emails was build from the messages received by the authors over a period of time. Initially, the corpus consisted of 1563, but after eliminating the duplications automatically we kept only 673 files, totalising just over 373,000 tokens. In order to decide if the junk emails constitute a different genre, a comparison with a corpus of leaflets extracted from BNC and with the whole BNC corpus is carried out. Several characteristics at the lexical and grammatical levels were identified.",

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AB - Almost everyone who has an email account receives from time to time unwanted emails. These emails can be jokes from friends or commercial product offers from unknown people. In this paper we focus on these unwanted messages which try to promote a product or service, or to offer some “hot” business opportunities. These messages are called junk emails. Several methods to filter junk emails were proposed, but none considers the linguistic characteristics of junk emails. In this paper, we investigate the linguistic features of a corpus of junk emails, and try to decide if they constitute a distinct genre. Our corpus of junk emails was build from the messages received by the authors over a period of time. Initially, the corpus consisted of 1563, but after eliminating the duplications automatically we kept only 673 files, totalising just over 373,000 tokens. In order to decide if the junk emails constitute a different genre, a comparison with a corpus of leaflets extracted from BNC and with the whole BNC corpus is carried out. Several characteristics at the lexical and grammatical levels were identified.

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ER -

A corpus-based investigation of junk emails

Abstract

Conference

Bibliographical note

Keywords

Access to Document

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Cite this