In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the number of complex documents and texts that require a deeper understanding of machine learning methods to be able to accurately classify texts in many applications. Many machine learning approaches have achieved surpassing results in natural language processing. The success of these learning algorithms relies on their capacity to understand complex models and non-linear relationships within data. However, finding suitable structures, architectures, and techniques for text classification is a challenge for researchers. In this paper, a brief overview of text classification algorithms is discussed. This overview covers different text feature extractions, dimensionality reduction methods, existing algorithms and techniques, and evaluations methods. Finally, the limitations of each technique and their application in real-world problems are discussed.Spelling correction is an optional pre-processing step. Typos (short for typographical errors) are commonly present in texts and documents, especially in social media text data sets (e.g., Twitter). Many algorithms, techniques, and methods have addressed this problem in NLP [49]. Many techniques and methods are available for researchers including hashing-based and context-sensitive spelling correction techniques [50], as well as spelling correction using Trie and Damerau-Levenshtein distance bigram [51].
StemmingIn NLP, one word could appear in different forms (i.e., singular and plural noun form) while the semantic meaning of each form is the same [52]. One method for consolidating different forms of a word into the same feature space is stemming. Text stemming modifies words to obtain variant word forms using different linguistic processes such as affixation (addition of affixes) [53,54]. For example, the stem of the word "studying" is "study".
LemmatizationLemmatization is a NLP process that replaces the suffix of a word with a different one or removes the suffix of a word completely to get the basic word form (lemma) [54][55][56].
Syntactic Word RepresentationMany researchers have worked on this text feature extraction technique to solve the loosing syntactic and semantic relation between words. Many researchers addressed novel techniques for solving this problem, but many of these techniques still have limitations. In [57], a model was introduced in which the usefulness of including syntactic and semantic knowledge in the text representation for the selection of sentences comes from technical genomic texts. The other solution for syntactic problem is using the n-gram technique for feature extraction.
N-GramThe n-gram technique is a set of n-word which occurs "in that order" in a text set. This is not a representation of a text, but it could be used as a feature to represent a text.BOW is a representation of a text using its words (1-gram) which loses their order (syntactic). This model is very easy to obtain and the text can be represented through a vector, generally of a manageable size of the text. On the ...