Improving the Quality of Your Text Analysis Classifications

After you've gotten started with text analysis, there are ways that you can tidy up and improve your classifications. Read on for the next steps to refine your initial text analysis work.

• Resolving Anything Left Unclassified
• Checking the Quality of Classified Responses
• Troubleshooting Classifications
• Editing Your Classifications

Resolving Anything Left Unclassified

As with all text classification, it's always a good idea to review the work done and clean up anything outstanding. Once the AI has run, the screen will look something like this:

Notice the "Uncategorized" theme on the left, some responses remain unclassified. In the example, there is a text response "undefined" without an associated theme. "Undefined" doesn't represent anything meaningful, so let's classify it as "Missing Data".

Select the response "undefined" and click the "Missing Data" theme.

Next, review any remaining unclassified responses and classify them. You can create a new theme, such as "All other responses" to capture the responses that don't fit into existing themes.

1. Set the Show responses from dropdown to Uncategorized to show all unclassified responses.
2. Right-click anywhere in the Themes pane and select Add Theme.
3. Give the new theme a label, e.g. "All other responses" and click OK.
4. Select the unclassified responses you want to classify.
5. In the Themes pane, select "All other responses" and then click Classify as.

Checking the Quality of Classified Responses

It's important to give any automatic classification a quality check before reporting on your analysis. A quick way of doing that is to select a theme from the Show responses from dropdown, and quickly scan through for a quality check.

If there are more than a few items that you need to reclassify into an entirely different theme, assign them all to the "Uncategorized" theme. Then click Classify again to re-run the AI theme assignments.

Below, I've selected the "Indifference to Light or Zero Options" theme and can see that there are some items, such as "Caffine addiction", that are better placed in another theme.

You can manually reclassify responses:

1. Select the text response.
2. Then select the theme(s) to classify it as.
3. OPTIONAL: If moving to a different theme, deselect the theme(s) you want to move the text response from.
4. Click Move to, Add to, or Remove from.

Move to will remove the response from its current theme(s) and place it in the selected theme(s). Add to will add it to the selected theme(s). Remove from will remove responses from the selected theme(s). Below, "Caffine addiction" is moved to "All other responses" and removed from "Indifference to Light or Zero Options".

You can delete existing themes and reclassify them into an existing theme by right-clicking and selecting Delete and Reclassify as (and then selecting the theme to classify into), or delete a theme altogether by right-clicking and selecting Delete.

Alternatively, you can add more themes manually, or run the Create function again to create additional themes using AI.

See How to Refine and Edit Text Themes After Categorization for more details and examples for refining and editing your text themes.

Troubleshooting Classifications

You may find that the AI has struggled to classify a chunk of responses, or that some responses have been poorly classified when you do your quality check.

To improve the overall quality, consider the following tricks:

1. Edit the themes to make them more explicit by adding or editing the label to make sure that there's more overlap between the theme label and the data. Right-click an existing theme and select Rename to add to or edit the label.
2. If there is lots of variability in the data, e.g., if the responses are long-format and people say a lot of different things, consider adding more themes either manually (right-click > Add Theme) or by using the Create function for the AI to scan through unclassified responses.
3. You can help the AI improve by manually classifying some responses to existing themes so that it has some examples to learn from.

Editing Your Classifications

If you decide you want to revisit your classifications later on, either to review or update them or if you've updated your input data, you can edit your existing classifications. Click the variable with "Categorized" in the name in the Data Sources pane, and then from the object inspector, click Data > Properties > Edit Categorization.

Next

Get Started With Text Analysis

Frequently Asked Questions about Text Analysis

How to Classify Text Data

How to Refine and Edit Text Themes After Classification