Word Ordering Without Syntax

Abstract: 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 LLM with a simple heuristic gives strong results on this task. Furthermore, we show that a long short-term memory (LSTM) LLM 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.