A paper proposing that a simple bag-of-words can perform close to Word Mover’s Distance by using proper normalization has been accepted by ICML 2022he international conference on machine learning.

Ryoma Sato, Makoto Yamada, Hisashi Kashima.
Re-evaluating Word Mover’s Distance.
In Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022.