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Whether it's okay to ignore word order really depends on your goals. In my work, tracking word order to build a sentence representation is necessary to get comp

Whether it's okay to ignore word order really depends on your goals. In my work, tracking word order to build a sentence representation is necessary to get composition rules correct. You can get away with ignoring order surprisingly often but when it's needed, it's vital. When aggregated across an entire corpus, order ends up mattering a lot, in an absolute sense (something looking only at accuracy numbers will hide). Compare the following: 1) You must state the benefit. 2) You must benefit the state. 3) Feed fish vs. Fish feed. Sometimes limits in inference: 1) A loves B. 2) Cats eat fish. 3) Cats are mammals. Sometimes the sequence preceding or following will be important: 1) Problems with learning 2) Learning with problems 3) It has a learning problem 4) A learning problem for it. Or consider an example from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2335962_How_Well_Can_Passage_Meaning_be_Derived_without_Using_Word_Order_A_Comparison_of_Latent_Semantic_Analysis_and_Humans https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2335962_How_Well_Ca... 1) It was not the sales manager who hit the bottle that day, but the office worker with the serious drinking problem. 2) That day the office manager, who was drinking, hit the problem sales worker with the bottle, but it was not serious. Order ends up mattering when you want to capture nuance or power higher order inference.

yorwba 9y ago
Right, what I meant was not that order doesn't matter at all, but that order mostly doesn't matter for the meaning of individual words (except for some homonyms which can be disambiguated using syntactical information). When you want to handle whole sentences, obviously order becomes much more relevant, but for that you'd feed the word vectors into an LSTM or similar to handle the order-dependence.
neoncontrails 9y ago
This is much more nuanced criticism of language vectors than Chomsky's impatient hatred of them. There are interviews worth watching in which he loathes them for all the reasons you mention. Thankfully, I suppose, they rarely disappoint me. :)

yorwba 9y ago

Right, what I meant was not that order doesn't matter at all, but that order mostly doesn't matter for the meaning of individual words (except for some homonyms which can be disambiguated using syntactical information). When you want to handle whole sentences, obviously order becomes much more relevant, but for that you'd feed the word vectors into an LSTM or similar to handle the order-dependence.

neoncontrails 9y ago

This is much more nuanced criticism of language vectors than Chomsky's impatient hatred of them. There are interviews worth watching in which he loathes them for all the reasons you mention. Thankfully, I suppose, they rarely disappoint me. :)