Benchmark Performance of Machine And Deep Learning Based Methodologies for Urdu Text Document Classification

In order to provide benchmark performance for Urdu text document classification, the contribution of this paper is manifold. First, it pro-vides a publicly available benchmark dataset manually tagged against 6 classes. Second, it investigates the performance impact of traditional machine learning based Urdu text document classification methodologies by embedding 10 filter-based feature selection algorithms which have been widely used for other languages. Third, for the very first time, it as-sesses the performance of various deep learning based methodologies for Urdu text document classification. In this regard, for experimentation, we adapt 10 deep learning classification methodologies which have pro-duced best performance figures for English text classification. Fourth, it also investigates the performance impact of transfer learning by utiliz-ing Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers approach for Urdu language. Fifth, it evaluates the integrity of a hybrid approach which combines traditional machine learning based feature engineering and deep learning based automated feature engineering. Experimental results show that feature selection approach named as Normalised Dif-ference Measure along with Support Vector Machine outshines state-of-the-art performance on two closed source benchmark datasets CLE Urdu Digest 1000k, and CLE Urdu Digest 1Million with a significant margin of 32%, and 13% respectively. Across all three datasets, Normalised Differ-ence Measure outperforms other filter based feature selection algorithms as it significantly uplifts the performance of all adopted machine learning, deep learning, and hybrid approaches. The source code and presented dataset are available at Github repository.