Even the Simplest Baseline Needs Careful Re-investigation: A Case Study on XML-CNN

The power and the potential of deep learning models attract many researchers to design advanced and sophisticated architectures. Nevertheless, the progress is sometimes unreal due to various possible reasons. In this work, through an astonishing example we argue that more efforts should be paid to ensure the progress in developing a new deep learning method. For a highly influential multi-label text classification method XML-CNN, we show that the superior performance claimed in the original paper was mainly due to some unbelievable coincidences. We re-examine XML-CNN and make a re-implementation which reveals some contradictory findings to the claims in the original paper. Our study suggests suitable baselines for multi-label text classification tasks and confirms that the progress on a new architecture cannot be confidently justified without a cautious investigation.