Extreme learning machines in the field of text classification The World Wide Web serves as a huge repository of information that is highly dynamic, diverse and growing at an exponential rate in a lightening speed. In order to speed-up and further improve tasks like information search and retrieval, personalization etc; it is highly important to develop techniques to classify text documents more accurately and efficiently than before. This paper is an effort in that direction, where the effectiveness of Extreme Learning Machines(ELM) in the domain of text classification is studied and compared with many of the existing relevant techniques like Support Vector Machines(SVM), which are currently one of the most popular and effective techniques for classifying text documents. Ours is one of the few works that highlight the high performance of ELM in the field of text classification, by implementing classifiers based on different interpretations of ELM, analyzing their performance, and studying which feature selection techniques are most suited to improve their accuracy. In our multi-class classification problem, we studied a single ELM classifier based on the one-against-all scheme, and a multi-layer ELM classifier inspired from deep networks, and then perform extensive experiments on different datasets to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of our approach. Results show that ELM based classifiers can outperform many of the traditional classification techniques including the most powerful state-of-the-art technique such as SVM.