A rule-based category is a label that is assigned to a piece of text, typically by a software program, according to a set of rules.
This type of categorization can be useful in a variety of situations, such as when automatically assigning labels to emails or articles for the purposes of organization or filtering.
Examples of rule-based category
Here are two examples of a rule-based category:
- Email categorization: Most email providers allow users to set up rules that will automatically assign labels to incoming messages. For instance, a user might create a rule that assigns the label “Family” to any email that comes from a certain address.
- Article categorization: Online news sites often use rule-based category systems to automatically assign labels to articles. For example, an article about the stock market might be automatically assigned the label “Finance”.
Rule-based category and Other Categories
Rule-based category can be contrasted with other types of categorization, such as manual categorization and machine learning-based categorization.
Manual categorization is when a human being looks at a piece of text and decides which label to assign it. This is the traditional way of doing things, and it can be very accurate, but it is also slow and expensive.
Machine learning-based categorization is when a computer program is trained on a dataset of labeled text, and then used to label new text. This approach can be faster and more accurate than manual categorization, but it requires a large amount of training data.
Rule-based category systems are somewhere in between manual categorization and machine learning-based categorization. They are not as fast or accurate as machine learning, but they don’t require nearly as much training data.
Disadvatages of rule-based category
One downside of rule-based category systems is that they can be brittle; if the rules are not carefully designed, they can produce a lot of false positives (i.e., text that is incorrectly labeled).
Another downside is that they can be difficult to design and implement. Creating a set of rules that accurately categorizes text is not a trivial task.
Nonetheless, rule-based category systems can be useful in situations where speed and accuracy are important, but training data is limited.