Event classification from the Urdu language text on social media

Abstract

The real-time availability of the Internet has engaged millions of users around the world. The usage of regional languages is being preferred for effective and ease of communication that is causing multilingual data on social networks and news channels. People share ideas, opinions, and events that are happening globally i.e., sports, inflation, protest, explosion, and sexual assault, etc. in regional (local) languages on social media. Extraction and classification of events from multilingual data have become bottlenecks because of resource lacking. In this research paper, we presented the event classification task for the Urdu language text existing on social media and the news channels by using machine learning classifiers. The dataset contains more than 0.1 million (102,962) labeled instances of twelve (12) different types of events. The title, its length, and the last four words of a sentence are used as features to classify the events. The Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (tf-idf) showed the best results as a feature vector to evaluate the performance of the six popular machine learning classifiers. Random Forest (RF) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) are among the classifiers that out-performed among other classifiers by achieving 98.00% and 99.00% accuracy, respectively. The novelty lies in the fact that the features aforementioned are not applied, up to the best of our knowledge, in the event extraction of the text written in the Urdu language.

Keywords

• Social media
• Event classification
• Resource poor
• Machine learning
• Text
• Natural language processing