A Comparison of Classification Techniques for Technical Text Passages

technique is applicable to free form, short text summaries of data that may be stored in a database, file, or document. We refer to these types of text as " technical text passages ". These summaries may not follow standard grammar conventions; they commonly contain abbreviations, technical phrases, misspelled words and industry specific acronyms. Typical types of text to be classified include aircraft engine repair shop findings, industrial manufacturing quality problems and corrective actions, and standardization of attributes in a bill-of-materials. In this paper, we will present our results in using machine learning and rule based algorithms to categorize text. Our results show that the rules based approach is as good as several machine learning approaches. For example, using Support Vector Machine algorithms we were able to achieve 82% accuracy on validation set, using 1,645 training samples and 823 validation samples. Each category had 50 or more samples. Using rule-based approach we were able to achieve 80% accuracy.