Work

Forget me not: A Gentle Reminder to Mind the Simple Multi-Layer Perceptron Baseline for Text Classification.

Year: 2021
Type: preprint
Abstract: Graph neural networks have triggered a resurgence of graph-based text classification. We show that already a simple MLP baseline achieves comparable performance on benchmark datasets, questioning the importance of synthetic graph structures. When considering an inductive scenario, i. e., when adding new documents to a corpus, a simple MLP even outperforms the recent graph-based models TextGCN and HeteGCN and is comparable with HyperGAT. We further fine-tune DistilBERT and find that it outperforms all state-of-the-art models. We suggest that future studies use at least an MLP baseline to contextualize the results. We provide recommendations for the design and training of such a baseline.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3198375508
Cites: 44
Cited by: 4
Related to: 10