About Categories

Categories refer to a group of closely related concepts, opinions, or attitudes. To be useful, a category should also be easily described by a short phrase or label that captures its essential meaning.

For example, if you are analyzing survey responses from consumers about a new laundry soap, you can create a category labeled odor that contains all of the responses describing the smell of the product. However, such a category would not differentiate between those who found the smell pleasant and those who found it offensive. Since IBM® SPSS® Modeler Text Analytics is capable of extracting opinions when using the appropriate resources, you could then create two other categories to identify respondents who enjoyed the odor and respondents who disliked the odor.

You can create and work with your categories in the Categories pane in the upper left pane of the Categories and Concepts view window. Each category is defined by one or more descriptors. Descriptors are concepts, types, and patterns, as well as category rules that have been used to define a category.

If you want to see the descriptors that make up a given category, you can click the pencil icon in the Categories pane toolbar and then expand the tree to see the descriptors. Alternatively, select the category and open the Category Definitions dialog box (View > Category Definitions).

When you build categories automatically using category building techniques such as concept inclusion, the techniques will use concepts and types as the descriptors to create your categories. If you extract TLA patterns, y ou can also add patterns or parts of those patterns as category descriptors. See the topic Exploring Text Link Analysis for more information. And if you build clusters, you can add the concepts in a cluster to new or existing categories. Lastly, you can manually create category rules to use as descriptors in your categories. See the topic Using Category Rules for more information.