Methods for Creating Categories

Because every dataset is unique, the number of category creation methods and the order in which you apply them may change over time. Additionally, since your text mining goals may be different from one set of data to the next, you may need to experiment with the different methods to see which one produces the best results for the given text data. None of the automatic techniques will perfectly categorize your data; therefore we recommend finding and applying one or more automatic techniques that work well with your data.

Besides using text analysis packages (TAPs, *.tap) with prebuilt category sets, you can also categorize your responses using any combination of the following methods:

• Automatic building techniques. Several linguistic-based and frequency-based category options are available to automatically build categories for you. See the topic Building Categories for more information.
• Automatic extending techniques. Several linguistic techniques are available to extend existing categories by adding and enhancing descriptors so that they capture more records. See the topic Extending Categories for more information.
• Manual techniques. There are several manual methods, such as drag-and-drop. See the topic Creating Categories Manually for more information.