Classifying and Segmenting Classical and Modern Standard Arabic using Minimum Cross-Entropy

Text classification is the process of assigning a text or a document to various predefined classes or categories to reflect their contents. With the rapid growth of Arabic text on the Web, studies that address the problems of classification and segmentation of the Arabic language are limited compared to other languages, most of which implement word-based and feature extraction algorithms. This paper adopts a PPM character-based compression scheme to classify and segment Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) texts. An initial experiment using the PPM classification method on samples of text resulted in an accuracy of 95.5%, an average precision of 0.958, an average recall of 0.955 and an average Fmeasure of 0.954, using the concept of minimum cross-entropy. PPM-based classification experiments on standard Arabic corpora showed that they contained different types of text (CA or MSA), or a mixture of the both (CA and MSA). Further experiments with the same corpora showed that a more accurate picture of the contents of the corpora was possible using the PPM-based segmentation method. Tag-based compression experiments (using tags produced by parts-of-speech Arabic taggers) also showed that the quality of the tagging (as measured by compression quality) is significantly affected when tagging either CA and MSA text. The conclusion is that NLP applications (such as taggers) should treat these texts separately and use different training data for each or process them differently. Keywords—text classification; Arabic language; Classical Arabic; Modern Standard Arabic