Yes, if no shuffling is involved, torchtext sorts data by the word length of the text object (because we define sort_key as def sort_key(ex): return len(ex.text), as in cell 115 of this notebook), and in the case of ties, it breaks them by preserving the original order. So I would sort my data by those two factors too. It does that because it tries to group texts with similar lengths together in a batch to feed into the model.