Graph Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing: A Survey

Deep learning has become the dominant approach in coping with various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Although text inputs are typically represented as a sequence of tokens, there is a rich variety of NLP problems that can be best expressed with a graph structure. As a result, there is a surge of interests in developing new deep learning techniques on graphs for a large number of NLP tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for Natural Language Processing. We propose a new taxonomy of GNNs for NLP, which systematically organizes existing research of GNNs for NLP along three axes: graph construction, graph representation learning, and graph based encoder-decoder models. We further introduce a large number of NLP applications that are exploiting the power of GNNs and summarize the corresponding benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source codes. Finally, we discuss various outstanding challenges for making the full use of GNNs for NLP as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive overview of Graph Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing.