A design pattern provides a proven solution to a problem that commonly occurs in software design. It provides a flexible, reusable, and modular software design with objectoriented programming. The selection process of design patterns is however a difficult task, especially for novice designers. In our previous work, we constructed a pattern usage hierarchy for helping a designer to select Gang-of-Four patterns. The pattern usage hierarchy was constructed based on the intentions of a user, which can be divided into five categories. The experimental results motivated an improvement by incorporation of an algorithm for recommending the category to which a given problem belongs. We apply a text classification approach in order to guide the user to select an appropriate category. Famous classification methods, i.e., Naïve Bayes, J48, k-NN, and SVM, are used to classify given textual problems. The framework was evaluated with 26 case studies. The results of the experiment are reported.