Deep learning has become the dominant approach in coping with various tasks
in Natural LanguageProcessing (NLP). Although text inputs are typically
represented as a sequence of tokens, there isa rich variety of NLP problems
that can be best expressed with a graph structure. As a result, thereis a surge
of interests in developing new deep learning techniques on graphs for a large
numberof NLP tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview onGraph
Neural Networks(GNNs) for Natural Language Processing. We propose a new
taxonomy of GNNs for NLP, whichsystematically organizes existing research of
GNNs for NLP along three axes: graph construction,graph representation
learning, and graph based encoder-decoder models. We further introducea large
number of NLP applications that are exploiting the power of GNNs and summarize
thecorresponding benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source codes.
Finally, we discussvarious outstanding challenges for making the full use of
GNNs for NLP as well as future researchdirections. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first comprehensive overview of Graph NeuralNetworks for
Natural Language Processing.Comment: 127 page