[Objective] TF‐IDF algorithm solves the problem of external corpus dependence in short text classification, but it has the problem of weight concentration and low text discrimination when calculating text features. Therefore, a short text classification method based on Chi square statistics and tf‐iwf algorithm is proposed. [method] the feature words are extracted from the training data set by chi square statistics. The feature words are weighted by tf‐iwf algorithm, and then classified by SVM classifier. [results] the experimental results show that the accuracy of text classification is improved by 3.1%, the recall is improved by 5.2%, and the F1 value is improved by 3.7% by combining chi square statistics and tf‐iwf. [Conclusion] the method expands the range of the weight value of feature words, increases the variance of the weight value of the text set, and solves the problem of sparsity of short text content to a certain extent, so as to improve the performance of short text classification.