# Bag-of-Words vs. Graph vs. Sequence in Text Classification: Questioning the Necessity of Text-Graphs and the Surprising Strength of a Wide MLP

Published in 60th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2022

Recommended citation: Lukas Galke, Ansgar Scherp, "Bag-of-Words vs. Graph vs. Sequence in Text Classification: Questioning the Necessity of Text-Graphs and the Surprising Strength of a Wide MLP" ACL 2022. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.03777

To appear at ACL 2022.

Abstract: Graph neural networks have triggered a resurgence of graph-based text classification methods, defining today’s state of the art. We show that a wide multi-layer perceptron (MLP) using a Bag-of-Words (BoW) outperforms the recent graph-based models TextGCN and HeteGCN in an inductive text classification setting and is comparable with HyperGAT. Moreover, we fine-tune a sequence-based BERT and a lightweight DistilBERT model, which both outperform all state-of-the-art models. These results question the importance of synthetic graphs used in modern text classifiers. In terms of efficiency, DistilBERT is still twice as large as our BoW-based wide MLP, while graph-based models like TextGCN require setting up an $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ graph, where $N$ is the vocabulary plus corpus size. Finally, since Transformers need to compute $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ attention weights with sequence length $L$, the MLP models show higher training and inference speeds on datasets with long sequences.