Enterprise E-Mail Classification Using Instruction-Following Large Language Models


Sarıyıldız A. Ç., DURUKAN ODABAŞI Ş.

Applied Sciences (Switzerland), vol.16, no.5, 2026 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 16 Issue: 5
  • Publication Date: 2026
  • Doi Number: 10.3390/app16052173
  • Journal Name: Applied Sciences (Switzerland)
  • Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Compendex, INSPEC, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Keywords: applied machine learning, enterprise e-mail classification, instruction-following models, large language models, natural language processing
  • Istanbul University Affiliated: No

Abstract

Enterprise e-mail corpora contain heterogeneous and domain-specific content that poses challenges for conventional supervised Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches due to class imbalance, evolving terminology, and limited labeled data. This study examines the use of instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) for enterprise e-mail classification under realistic operational conditions. The study evaluates instruction-based classification and semantic enrichment derived from distributional similarity as two complementary approaches for distinguishing technical from nontechnical messages. The approaches are assessed on a large-scale enterprise e-mail corpus and validated using a manually annotated subset. The results indicate that instruction-following LLMs provide stable contextual reasoning across diverse message structures, while semantic enrichment improves coverage of previously unseen technical expressions. Overall, the study presents an applied NLP framework for enterprise e-mail classification, with attention to interpretability, scalability, and robustness in real-world organizational settings.