Analyzing Elements of Letters in a Letter Management System

This paper describes analyzing elements of letters in a letter management system. The primary elements of a letter are a sender, a receiver, and terms which are words and named entities appeared in the letter. A letter management system is developed for letters in the Avery Brundage Collection, named LMBC. By analyzing a collection of such letters, exchanges of letters among persons, and topics and/or contents in the letters are made clear. Then, named entities play important role not only for representing letters, but also for analyzing them. Named entities are extracted from a letter using the definitions of named entities, since some different representations are appeared for one named entity. LMBC provides some useful mechanisms. First, exchanges of letters between their senders and receivers are visualized. Second, words/named entities are counted, after synonym resolution is applied. Moreover, co-occurrence relationships of named entities are examined. Then some of named entities are co-occurred frequently. Such co-occurred named entities are formed into one concept, and this concept is treated as one node when co-occurrence relation is represented in a graph. Furthermore, relationships of two named entities are obtained by traversing connections between them. Using these mechanisms exchanges of letters and co-occurrences of named entities are depicted in suitable graphs. Interrelationships among named entities are made clear.