In recent years, there have been extensive studies and rapid progresses in automatic text categorization, which is one of the hotspots and key techniques in the information retrieval and data mining field. Highlighting the state-of-art challenging issues and research trends for content information processing of Internet and other complex applications, this paper presents a survey on the up-to-date development in text categorization based on machine learning, including model, algorithm and evaluation. It is pointed out that problems such as nonlinearity, skewed data distribution, labeling bottleneck, hierarchical categorization, scalability of algorithms and categorization of Web pages are the key problems to the study of text categorization. Possible solutions to these problems are also discussed respectively. Finally, some future directions of research are given.