@inproceedings{bommasani-2019-long,
    title = "Long-Distance Dependencies Don{'}t Have to Be Long: Simplifying through Provably (Approximately) Optimal Permutations",
    author = "Bommasani, Rishi",
    editor = "Alva-Manchego, Fernando  and
      Choi, Eunsol  and
      Khashabi, Daniel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop",
    month = jul,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/P19-2012/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P19-2012",
    pages = "89--99",
    abstract = "Neural models at the sentence level often operate on the constituent words/tokens in a way that encodes the inductive bias of processing the input in a similar fashion to how humans do. However, there is no guarantee that the standard ordering of words is computationally efficient or optimal. To help mitigate this, we consider a dependency parse as a proxy for the inter-word dependencies in a sentence and simplify the sentence with respect to combinatorial objectives imposed on the sentence-parse pair. The associated optimization results in permuted sentences that are provably (approximately) optimal with respect to minimizing dependency parse lengths and that are demonstrably simpler. We evaluate our general-purpose permutations within a fine-tuning schema for the downstream task of subjectivity analysis. Our fine-tuned baselines reflect a new state of the art for the SUBJ dataset and the permutations we introduce lead to further improvements with a 2.0{\%} increase in classification accuracy (absolute) and a 45{\%} reduction in classification error (relative) over the previous state of the art."
}