Studying word order through iterative shuffling

Nikolay Malkin, Sameera Lanka, Pranav Goel, Nebojsa Jojic


Abstract
As neural language models approach human performance on NLP benchmark tasks, their advances are widely seen as evidence of an increasingly complex understanding of syntax. This view rests upon a hypothesis that has not yet been empirically tested: that word order encodes meaning essential to performing these tasks. We refute this hypothesis in many cases: in the GLUE suite and in various genres of English text, the words in a sentence or phrase can rarely be permuted to form a phrase carrying substantially different information. Our surprising result relies on inference by iterative shuffling (IBIS), a novel, efficient procedure that finds the ordering of a bag of words having the highest likelihood under a fixed language model. IBIS can use any black-box model without additional training and is superior to existing word ordering algorithms. Coalescing our findings, we discuss how shuffling inference procedures such as IBIS can benefit language modeling and constrained generation.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.809
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10351–10366
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.809
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.809
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikolay Malkin, Sameera Lanka, Pranav Goel, and Nebojsa Jojic. 2021. Studying word order through iterative shuffling. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10351–10366, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Studying word order through iterative shuffling (Malkin et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.809.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.809.mp4
Code
 malkin1729/ibis
Data
GLUEQNLI