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.

Studying word order through iterative shuffling

Virtual Poster Session II: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Nikolay Malkin

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Studying word order through iterative shuffling

Studying word order through iterative shuffling

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