The exponential growth of digital text documents presents a significant challenge for text classification algorithms, as the vast number of words in each document can hinder their efficiency. Feature selection (FS) is a crucial technique that aims to eliminate irrelevant features and enhance classification accuracy. In this study, we propose an improved version of the discrete laying chicken algorithm (IDLCA) that utilizes noun-based filtering to reduce the number of features and improve text classification performance. Although LCA is a newly proposed algorithm, it has not been systematically applied to discrete problems before. Our enhanced version of LCA employs different operators to improve both exploration and exploitation of this algorithm to find better solutions in discrete mode. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compared it with some conventional nature-inspired feature selection methods using various learning models such as decision trees (DT), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Naive Bayes (NB), and support vector machine (SVM) on five benchmark datasets with three different evaluation metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in comparison to the existing one. The code is available at https://github.com/m0javad/Improved-Discrete-Laying-Chicken-Algorithm
