[starchand]

Which method would work best for email classification into 1 of 7 categories? Problem I've seen is 1 or 2 key sentences within the email can classify the message but they are usually outnumbered by generic sentences such as signatures, greetings, headers/footers etc

[sachin18590]

These are all frameworks and while none of them have any signular advantage over other especially in the problem statement you are looking for, you should ideally be able to figure out what works best for you based on the classification sensitivity and training data you are working with. The problem in itself can be quite simple to extremely complex based on the above 2 factors. Spacy's pre-processing tools are quite easy to use and that combined with tool like talon should help you clean up the email correctly. Thereafter, if your email text is pretty much to the point, then any intent classification tool will work, however, if the email text is long and intents are spread across, then you will need a hierarchical layer to understand the intent hierarchies as well as an attention layer to understand which intents to focus and not lose track of in an email. At that time, you are quite far from using a generic plug and play framework and will need to exactly and quite thoroughly understand the deep learning models you are working with as well as the dataset you have and the classification you are trying to build.

[starchand]

Thanks this is really helpful! I am using talon and sklearn as paragraph by paragraph intent classifier. I am classifying the whole email from the highest individual intent probability. This seems to be working well for my minimal test data (~200 sentences) but have yet to test in the wild. I will research hierarchical layer and attention layers.

[wodenokoto]

Generally these generic sentences should be randomly distributed, and so their effect should be minimal.

You can randomly add them to your training set, if you feel that real world data has them randomly distributed, but you training sample is too small to capture this.