BERT-enhanced Relational Sentence Ordering Network

In this paper, we introduce a novel BERTenhanced Relational Sentence Ordering Network (referred to as BERSON) by leveraging BERT for capturing a better dependency relationship among sentences to enhance the coherence modeling for the entire paragraph. In particular, we develop a new Relational Pointer Decoder (referred as RPD) by incorporating the relative ordering information into the pointer network with a Deep Relational Module (referred as DRM), which utilizes BERT to exploit the deep semantic connection and relative ordering between sentences. This enables us to strengthen both local and global dependencies among sentences. Extensive evaluations are conducted on six public datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and promise of BERSON, showing a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art by a wide margin. * Corresponding author An unordered set of sentences Coherent paragraph 1 Dan was walking during the night. 1 Dan was walking during the night. 3 They tried to steal his book bag. 2 A group of thieves surrounded him. 4 A bystander noticed them. 3 They tried to steal his book bag. 2 A group of thieves surrounded him. 4 A bystander noticed them. 5 But she continued to walk away. 5 But she continued to walk away.