  Text classification is a fundamental task in NLP applications. Latest
research in this field has largely been divided into two major sub-fields.
Learning representations is one sub-field and learning deeper models, both
sequential and convolutional, which again connects back to the representation
is the other side. We posit the idea that the stronger the representation is,
the simpler classifier models are needed to achieve higher performance. In this
paper we propose a completely novel direction to text classification research,
wherein we convert text to a representation very similar to images, such that
any deep network able to handle images is equally able to handle text. We take
a deeper look at the representation of documents as an image and subsequently
utilize very simple convolution based models taken as is from computer vision
domain. This image can be cropped, re-scaled, re-sampled and augmented just
like any other image to work with most of the state-of-the-art large
convolution based models which have been designed to handle large image
datasets. We show impressive results with some of the latest benchmarks in the
related fields. We perform transfer learning experiments, both from text to
text domain and also from image to text domain. We believe this is a paradigm
shift from the way document understanding and text classification has been
traditionally done, and will drive numerous novel research ideas in the
community.
