Enhancing Pashto Text Classification using Language Processing Techniques for Single And Multi-Label Analysis

Text classification has become a crucial task in various fields, leading to a significant amount of research on developing automated text classification systems for national and international languages. However, there is a growing need for automated text classification systems that can handle local languages. This study aims to establish an automated classification system for Pashto text. We also evaluated two different feature extraction methods, bag of words and Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency. The study achieved an average testing accuracy rate of 94% using the MLP classification algorithm and TFIDF feature extraction method in single-label multiclass classification. Similarly, MLP+TFIDF yielded the best results, with an F1-measure of 0.81. Furthermore, the use of pre-trained language representation models, such as DistilBERT, showed promising results for Pashto text classification; however, the study highlights the importance of developing a specific tokenizer for a particular language to achieve reasonable results. NTRODUCTION The evolution of technology instigated the existence of an overwhelming number of electronic documents therefore text mining becomes a crucial task. Many businesses and individuals use machine learning techniques to classify documents accurately and quickly. On the other hand, more than 80% of organization information is in electronic format including news, email, data about users, reports, etc. (Raghavan, 2004). Text mining attracted the attention of researchers to automatically figure out the patterns of millions of electronic texts.