A gating context-aware text classification model with BERT and graph convolutional networks

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which are capable of effectively processing graph-structural data, have been successfully applied in text classification task. Existing studies on GCN based text classification model largely concerns with the utilization of word co-occurrence and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF–IDF) information for graph construction, which to some extent ignore the context information of the texts. To solve this problem, we propose a gating context-aware text classification model with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and graph convolutional network, named as Gating Context GCN (GC-GCN). More specifically, we integrate the graph embedding with BERT embedding by using a GCN with gating mechanism to enable the acquisition of context coding. We carry out text classification experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed model. Experimental results shown our model has respectively obtained 0.19%, 0.57%, 1.05% and 1.17% improvements over the Text-GCN baseline on the 20NG, R8, R52, and Ohsumed benchmark datasets. Furthermore, to overcome the problem that word co-occurrence and TF–IDF are not suitable for graph construction for short texts, Euclidean distance is used to combine with word co-occurrence and TF–IDF information. We obtain an improvement by 1.38% on the MR dataset compared to Text-GCN baseline.