{"slug": "ask-hn-how-important-is-document-category-recognition-in-data-classification", "title": "Ask HN: How important is document category recognition in data classification?", "summary": "A Hacker News user asks whether document category recognition (e.g., technical manual, customer list, employee record) is important for data classification, noting that regex-based classification of IDs and numbers leads to false positives and negatives. The user is building a non-AI, light model and embedding-based classifier to semantically understand documents and seeks opinions on the usefulness of adding document category recognition.", "body_md": "Classifying files based solely on presence of IDs, numbers and other regex patterns, from experience, leads to much false positives and negatives. A technical manual document with a 9 digit number could trigger a SSN pattern check and get wrongly classified as having personal data /Confidential.\n\nPersonal data on a HR document would be treated differently from personal data on a customer list.\n\nWould identifying the document category (tech manual, customer list, employee record) be a good additional layer to classifier logic? I'm trying to build a non-AI, light model and embedding based classifier that can semantically understand documents, and like opinions on how useful such a thing would be.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49280386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49280386)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-important-is-document-category-recognition-in-data-classification", "canonical_source": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49280386", "published_at": "2026-08-13 00:31:03+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-13 00:41:01.768203+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["machine-learning", "natural-language-processing"], "entities": ["Hacker News"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-important-is-document-category-recognition-in-data-classification", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-important-is-document-category-recognition-in-data-classification.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-important-is-document-category-recognition-in-data-classification.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-important-is-document-category-recognition-in-data-classification.jsonld"}}