Word Ordering Without Syntax The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters

Recent work on word ordering has argued that syntactic structure is important, or even re-quired, for effectively recovering the order of a sentence. We find that, in fact, an n-gram language model with a simple heuristic gives strong results on this task. Furthermore, we show that a long short-term memory (LSTM) language model 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. order in