natural language processing blog: A dagger by any other name: scheduled sampling

Scheduled Sampling was at NIPS last year; the reviews are also online. This is actually the third time I've tried to make my way through this paper, and to force myself to not give up again, I'm writing my impressions here. Given that this paper is about two things I know a fair amount about (imitation learning and neural networks), I kept getting frustrated at how hard it was for me to actually understand what was going on and how it related to things we've known for a long time. So this post is trying to ease entry for anyone else in that position. What is the problem this paper is trying to solve?