[kaj_sotala]

I would imagine that if you are training on the text of a novel, then anything that happened earlier in the text may be relevant for predicting the next events. Especially if it's something like a detective novel that has clues about the criminal's identity scattered across the story.

Also if you are training on a database of code.

[sweezyjeezy]

Yeah but when you're training a neural net with backprop on a finite dataset, "this would help the model" ≠ "the model will learn this". This is 100% speculation, but my intuition is that it's not going to work very well unless it happens 'a lot' in the training data, or if they've curated the data specifically to try and make it learn long range signals.