Text Classification: Applications and Use Cases
Text classification is an excellent way to smoothly sort data texts.
Many companies have loads of data text to process, prompting the need for data classification.
While the accounting and legal part of most enterprises operate better with professional individuals that possess years of experience, other fields require
basic skills in data analysis, grouping, and filtering.
Hence the need for text classification.
Innovative businesses solve their data management problems with this modern technology.
This blog post will discuss the basics of text classification and how to apply the technology to business. We’ll also explore some of its real-world use cases.
What is Text Classification
Text classification automatically sets a category or label to a piece of text. It’s a supervised learning task, meaning you need a labeled text dataset to train your model.
The application of text classification cuts across several areas, including spam filtering, text mining, and document categorization. It’s a core technology for users or businesses that require machine learning capabilities.
Text classification works with many algorithms. With the many different applications for text classification in business, it’s essential to choose the right algorithm and deployment method for every specific use case. The labels often range from positive/negative sentiment to topics or categories.
The algorithm depends on the size and quality of the training data, computational resources available, and the specifics of the task.
How Do Text Classification Applications Work In Businesses
The application of text classification is endless within businesses.
With text classification applications, businesses will streamline processes that relate to text identification, organization, and security.
Here are a few ways companies apply text classification.
- In automating customer support by routing customers to the appropriate department based on the content of their inquiries.
- Sentiment analysis – it helps the business owner understand how customers feel about a product or service.
- Topic categorization automatically organizes documents into different categories.
- Classifying content and products enables users to navigate within a website.
Top 10 Text Classification Applications
Text classification applications are countless. Different algorithms automatically categorize text data in the world of text classification. It also serves other purposes like identifying the sentiment of a document and even finding plagiarised content.
Here is a detailed list of the most valid applications of text classification in the real world;
- Topic classification
Topic classification or labeling automatically assigns a category or label to a text document. In clear terms, it uses an algorithm to understand a given text.
Unlike topic modeling, where the definition of topic tags are irrelevant, topic classifiers extract the topic from the text before the analysis begins. Hence they perform a more accurate and precise job than quick clustering techniques.
Manual data processing won’t produce an efficient or accurate job when it involves a large amount of text data. With topic classifiers, data processing is timely, accurate, and cost-effective.
Most individuals and organizations use this for tasks like news article categorization, email filtering, and customer feedback organization.
- Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis involves defining a text’s emotional tone and is also referred to as opinion mining.
It allows the user to analyze texts and discern what the author is feeling and their emotions at the moment of writing.
Sentiment analysis providers will provide sentiment scores on entire documents or individual entities within the text.
Companies also utilize the analysis on a wide variety of apps. This allows for the smooth collection of customer feedback analysis and social media monitoring.
- Plagiarism detection
Plagiarism detection is a technique that identifies the instances where someone copies content from another source without giving credit.
Text classification enables the identification of plagiarism. It checks the uniqueness of an academic article to prevent content theft.
- Language identification
Language identification is a unique method for defining the language of a text document; and a solid example of the application of text classification.
It’s a solution for tasks like machine translation and multilingual document retrieval.
Another excellent example of this classification’s application is in routing. Let’s say routing tickets according to their language and choice team.
- Named entity recognition
Named entity recognition identifies specific names, places, organizations, etc., in a text document. It serves for information extraction and question-answering.
For news agencies and publishing houses where large amounts of online content are generated daily, named entity recognition saves time and effort by scanning entire articles to detect the significant names the companies mentioned automatically.
Hence automatic generation of relevant tags for the articles enables readers to navigate the news sites and discover the content of the writings without reading through them.
- Urgency Detection
Every month, hours are lost processing text data, keeping track of bugs, and understanding the problems and issues of a company’s customers.
A good urgency detection model will help a company’s customer care service team pick the most urgent customer mail out of a whole set. Data can automatically be classified as “Urgent” or “Not Urgent.”
Specific keywords or phrases such as “right away,” “as soon as possible,” “now,” etc., used in emails or messages get priority over the others.
- Online abuse detection
The purpose of these classifiers is to detect internet activities involving bullying and trolling, as well as any other content that’s not permitted.
If you employ a topic classifier, tracking specific topics on the internet becomes easier. Next, you will train the classifier to identify and categorize abusive language.
- Fraud detection
Text classification enables the detection of fake reviews on online shopping or review websites. The algorithm undergoes training on a dataset of real and fake reviews.
It uses the features of the reviews (such as the language, the sentiment, and the presence of certain keywords) to classify new reviews as real or fake.
- Medical diagnosis
Text classification assists in medical diagnosis by analyzing patient reports and identifying patterns or markers indicative of certain conditions or diseases.
Doctors’ notes on patients’ diagnoses go into the electronic health record systems and are stored as free texts, according to the hospital’s policies.
These free texts on the electronic health record systems make up vast volumes of unstructured patient data.
Specialized NLP engines restructure this data and fish out previously missed or improperly inputted diagnoses.
- Sentiment polarity analysis
Sentiment polarity analysis is a natural language processing(NLP) technique for identifying text data’s positivity, neutrality, or negativity.
The sentiment polarity test is another important one of the numerous text classification applications. Like the others, it utilizes NLP & Machine learning techniques to classify text accurately.
How to utilize the power of text classification
Text classification is a reliable way to ensure a machine learning algorithm performs excellently. Many businesses and companies that use machine learning need help understanding how to use the tool.
Here are a few ways to utilize the solution:
- Make clear definitions
Clearly define the text classification task you want to perform, plus the specific data you want to classify.
This will ensure that you use the right approach and data for your problem.
- Collect and preprocess your text data
This will involve scraping or collecting data from various sources and then cleaning and preparing it for analysis.
Remove irrelevant data and perform basic preprocessing steps like tokenization and stemming.
- Split your data into training and test sets
Use the training set to build your text classification model and the test set to evaluate its performance.
Splitting your data is critical to avoid bias in the training or test sets.
- Choose an appropriate algorithm
Choose a text classification algorithm that is appropriate for your specific problem. Many different algorithms are available for text classification, including support vector machines, k-nearest neighbors, and decision trees.
You’ll have to research and select the most appropriate algorithm for your problem.
- Train your text classification model
Train your model for text classification using the training set and the chosen algorithm. However, it would be best if you fine-tuned the model’s parameters to optimize its performance.
- Evaluate your model’s performance
Evaluation involves calculating accuracy scores, generating confusion matrices, or using other metrics to assess the model’s effectiveness.
If your model’s performance is unsatisfactory, you must go back and fine-tune the model’s parameters or choose a different algorithm.
Also, incorporate additional data or features into your model to see if that improves performance.
With these steps, you will effectively use text classification to analyze and organize your text data, and even incorporate its usefulness in your business.
The Application Of Text Classifications Is Limitless
Text classification is a powerful tool in today’s digital age. The solution helps to automate the process of categorizing text, saving businesses time and money while improving accuracy.
Its applications are endless and spread to many industries, with use cases ranging from customer service automation to data mining.
With its potential for machine learning tasks, text classification will continue to evolve into something even more powerful as technology advances.
