  Coherence is an important aspect of text quality and is crucial for ensuring
its readability. It is essential desirable for outputs from text generation
systems like summarization, question answering, machine translation, question
generation, table-to-text, etc. An automated coherence scoring model is also
helpful in essay scoring or providing writing feedback. A large body of
previous work has leveraged entity-based methods, syntactic patterns, discourse
relations, and more recently traditional deep learning architectures for text
coherence assessment. Previous work suffers from drawbacks like the inability
to handle long-range dependencies, out-of-vocabulary words, or model sequence
information. We hypothesize that coherence assessment is a cognitively complex
task that requires deeper models and can benefit from other related tasks.
Accordingly, in this paper, we propose four different Transformer-based
architectures for the task: vanilla Transformer, hierarchical Transformer,
multi-task learning-based model, and a model with fact-based input
representation. Our experiments with popular benchmark datasets across multiple
domains on four different coherence assessment tasks demonstrate that our
models achieve state-of-the-art results outperforming existing models by a good
margin.
