On the Role of Pre-trained Language Models in Word Ordering: A Case Study with BART

Abstract

Word ordering is a constrained language generation task taking unordered words as input. Existing work uses linear models and neural networks for the task, yet pre-trained language models have not been studied in word ordering, let alone why they help. We use BART as an instance and show its effectiveness in the task. To explain why BART helps word ordering, we extend analysis with probing and empirically identify that syntactic dependency knowledge in BART is a reliable explanation. We also report performance gains with BART in the related partial tree linearization task, which readily extends our analysis.