Is Everything in Order? A Simple Way to Order Sentences

Somnath Basu Roy Chowdhury, Faeze Brahman, Snigdha Chaturvedi


Abstract
The task of organizing a shuffled set of sentences into a coherent text has been used to evaluate a machine’s understanding of causal and temporal relations. We formulate the sentence ordering task as a conditional text-to-marker generation problem. We present Reorder-BART (Re-BART) that leverages a pre-trained Transformer-based model to identify a coherent order for a given set of shuffled sentences. The model takes a set of shuffled sentences with sentence-specific markers as input and generates a sequence of position markers of the sentences in the ordered text. Re-BART achieves the state-of-the-art performance across 7 datasets in Perfect Match Ratio (PMR) and Kendall’s tau. We perform evaluations in a zero-shot setting, showcasing that our model is able to generalize well across other datasets. We additionally perform several experiments to understand the functioning and limitations of our framework.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.841
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:
10769–10779
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.841
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.841
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Somnath Basu Roy Chowdhury, Faeze Brahman, and Snigdha Chaturvedi. 2021. Is Everything in Order? A Simple Way to Order Sentences. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10769–10779, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is Everything in Order? A Simple Way to Order Sentences (Basu Roy Chowdhury et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.emnlp-main.841.pdf
Software:
 2021.emnlp-main.841.Software.zip
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.emnlp-main.841.mp4
Code
 fabrahman/rebart