Text classification (TC) is one of the fundamental problems in text mining. Plenty of works exist on TC with interesting approaches and excellent results; however, most of these works follow a word-based approach for feature extraction. In this work, we are interested in an alternative (byte-based or character-based) approach known as compression-based TC (CTC). CTC has been used for some languages such as English and Portuguese and it is shown to have certain advantages/disadvantages compared with word-based approaches. This work applies CTC on the Arabic language with the purpose of investigating whether these advantages/disadvantages exists for the Arabic language as well. The results are encouraging as they show the viability of using CTC for Arabic TC.

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