  Coherence is an important aspect of text quality and is crucial for ensuring
its readability. One important limitation of existing coherence models is that
training on one domain does not easily generalize to unseen categories of text.
Previous work advocates for generative models for cross-domain generalization,
because for discriminative models, the space of incoherent sentence orderings
to discriminate against during training is prohibitively large. In this work,
we propose a local discriminative neural model with a much smaller negative
sampling space that can efficiently learn against incorrect orderings. The
proposed coherence model is simple in structure, yet it significantly
outperforms previous state-of-art methods on a standard benchmark dataset on
the Wall Street Journal corpus, as well as in multiple new challenging settings
of transfer to unseen categories of discourse on Wikipedia articles.
