Multi-Label Arabic Text Classification: An Overview

There is a massive growth of text documents on the web. This led to the increasing need for methods that can organize and classify electronic documents (instances) automatically. Multi-label classification task is widely used in real-world problems and it has been applied on different applications. It assigns multiple labels for each document simultaneously. Few and insufficient research studies have investigated the multi-label text classification problem in the Arabic language. Therefore, this survey paper aims to present an extensive review of the existing multi-label classification methods and techniques that can deal with multi-label problem. Besides, we focus on Arabic language by covering the relevant applications of multi-label classification on the Arabic text, and identify the main challenges faced by these studies. Furthermore, this survey presents an experimental comparisons of different multi-label classification methods applied for the Arabic context and points out some baseline results. We found that further investigations are also needed to improve the multi-label classification task in the Arabic language, especially the hierarchical classification task.