An Experimental Study for the Effect of Stop Words Elimination for Arabic Text Classification Algorithms

Preprocessing And Classification Process

The preprocessing of data set deals with the elimination of non-meaningful words which they don’t indicate to semantic content of the document. Some words appear in the sentences and don’t have any meaning or indications about the content such as (so لذلك, with بالإشارة, confirmation تأكيدا, for بالنسبة) or appearing frequently in the document like pronouns such as (heهو, she هي, they هم). Although the prepositions like (from من, to إلى, in في, about عن) or demonstratives like (this هذا, these هؤلاء, there أولئك) or interrogatives like (where أين, which أي, who من). These words may have a bad effect on statistical information and co-occurrence of the words as stated in Abo Alkhair (2006) and Said, Wanas, Darwish, and Hegazy (2009).

Also the numbers and symbols like (@, #, &, %, *) and some words that indicates a sequence of the sentences like (firstly أولا, secondly ثانيا, thirdly ثالثا), these words will be considered as an Arabic stop words. Some Arabic documents may contain foreign words, especially science documents, these words are alo considered as stop words as in Al-Shalabi, Kanaan, Jaam, Hasnah, and Hilat (2004) and El-Kourdi, Bensaid and Rachidi (2004).