  We study in this work the importance of depth in convolutional models for
text classification, either when character or word inputs are considered. We
show on 5 standard text classification and sentiment analysis tasks that deep
models indeed give better performances than shallow networks when the text
input is represented as a sequence of characters. However, a simple
shallow-and-wide network outperforms deep models such as DenseNet with word
inputs. Our shallow word model further establishes new state-of-the-art
performances on two datasets: Yelp Binary (95.9\%) and Yelp Full (64.9\%).

Computation and Language