Word Ordering Without Syntax

Understand

Recent work on word ordering has argued that syntactic structure is important, or even required, for effectively recovering the order of a sentence.

• We find that, in fact, an n-gram language model with a simple heuristic gives strong results on this task.
• Furthermore, we show that a long short-term memory (LSTM) language model is even more effective at recovering order, with our basic model outperforming a state-of-the-art syntactic model by 11.5 BLEU points.
• Additional data and larger beams yield further gains, at the expense of training and search time.