Classifying a Response Into More Than One Category¶

"The onboarding was confusing and support took days to respond" is one answer, but it's clearly raising two distinct themes. Forcing it into a single category means picking one and losing the other - which is exactly the situation multi-category classification is built for.

Single-Category vs. Multi-Category Classification¶

By default, classification assigns each response to the one category that best fits it. Multi-category classification is a different mode you can turn on for a question: instead of picking a single best-fit category, it can assign a response to every category it genuinely touches on, when a response reasonably spans more than one theme.

When to Use It¶

Multi-category classification is worth turning on for questions where answers commonly combine multiple ideas in one response - an open-ended "what would you improve" question is a common example, where a single answer often names more than one thing. It's less useful for a narrowly scoped question where a real answer is unlikely to span multiple themes in the first place; turning it on there mostly adds complexity without changing much about the results.

How It Affects Your Category Counts¶

With multi-category classification on, a single response can contribute to more than one category's count - which means your category totals, added together, can exceed your total number of responses. That's expected behavior, not a bug: it reflects that some individual responses are represented in more than one theme, not that responses were double-counted by mistake. Worth keeping in mind when you build a Reporting widget off these results, especially a percentage-based chart where the totals not summing to 100% is the correct outcome, not an error.

Reviewing Multi-Category Results¶

Manual review and correction (see Reviewing and Correcting Individual AI Classifications) still applies - you can adjust which categories a specific response was assigned to, including removing one of several categories a response was given or adding one that was missed.

FAQ¶

Is multi-category classification on by default?
No - it's a setting you turn on for a specific question. Standard classification assigns each response to a single best-fit category.

Can I turn multi-category classification on after I've already run single-category classification?
Check your Text Analytics settings for whether changing this setting requires re-running classification - since it changes how responses are analyzed, existing single-category results likely need to be reclassified for the setting to take effect.

Does a multi-category response cost more credits to classify than a single-category one?
Check your credit estimate before running classification with multi-category enabled - it's shown up front the same way any classification run's cost is.

How does a multi-category response show up in an export?
See Exporting Classified Responses with Confidence Scores - check the export format for how multiple category assignments per response are represented.

Is there a limit to how many categories a single response can be assigned?
Check your Text Analytics results for how a heavily multi-themed response is handled - in practice, most real responses touch on only a small number of distinct themes even when multi-category classification is enabled.

For the standard single-category workflow this builds on, see How Text Analytics Works: From Open-Ends to Categories.