ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Minimizing information overload: the ranking of electronic messages
Journal of Information Science
Cyberspace 2000: dealing with information overload
Communications of the ACM
Threading electronic mail: a preliminary study
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue: methods and tools for the automatic construction of hypertext
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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We present a generative model for determining the information content of a message without analyzing the message content. Such a tool is useful for automated analysis of the vast contents of online communication which are extensively contaminated by uninformative content, spam, and broadcast. Content analysis is not feasible in such a setting. We propose a purely statistical methodology to determine the information value of a message, which we denote the Information Content Factor (ICF). Underlying our methodology is the definition of information in a message as the message's ability to generate conversation. The generative nature of our model allows us to estimate the ICF of a message without prior information on the participants. We test our approach by applying it to separating spam/broadcast messages from non-spam/non-broadcast. Our algorithms achieve 94% accuracy when tested against a human classifier which analyzed content.