What is

SVM

Support Vector Machine. A supervised method that sorts things into categories by drawing the boundary between them, positioned as far as possible from the nearest cases on either side. Those nearest cases are the support vectors, and they alone define the line. Everything further away is irrelevant to it.

Reliable on small, clean datasets where a neural network would overfit, which is why it stayed a workhorse for text classification and quality control long after fashion moved on.