Using Machine Learning to Categorize Texts into Topics

After reading a news article -- whether the subject matter is U.S. politics, a movie review, or a productivity tip -- you can turn to someone else and give them a general idea of what it's about, right? Or if you read a novel, you can classify it as maybe sci-fi, literary fiction, or a romance. Humans tend to be pretty good at classifying texts. And these days, computers can do it, too. For a recent machine learning project, I downloaded consumer complaints from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and developed models to classify the complaints into one of five product categories.