Contextual Text Style Transfer

Yu Cheng, Zhe Gan, Yizhe Zhang, Oussama Elachqar, Dianqi Li, Jingjing Liu


Abstract
We introduce a new task, Contextual Text Style Transfer - translating a sentence into a desired style with its surrounding context taken into account. This brings two key challenges to existing style transfer approaches: (I) how to preserve the semantic meaning of target sentence and its consistency with surrounding context during transfer; (ii) how to train a robust model with limited labeled data accompanied by context. To realize high-quality style transfer with natural context preservation, we propose a Context-Aware Style Transfer (CAST) model, which uses two separate encoders for each input sentence and its surrounding context. A classifier is further trained to ensure contextual consistency of the generated sentence. To compensate for the lack of parallel data, additional self-reconstruction and back-translation losses are introduced to leverage non-parallel data in a semi-supervised fashion. Two new benchmarks, Enron-Context and Reddit-Context, are introduced for formality and offensiveness style transfer. Experimental results on these datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CAST model over state-of-the-art methods across style accuracy, content preservation and contextual consistency metrics.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.263
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2915–2924
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.263
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.263
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu Cheng, Zhe Gan, Yizhe Zhang, Oussama Elachqar, Dianqi Li, and Jingjing Liu. 2020. Contextual Text Style Transfer. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 2915–2924, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Contextual Text Style Transfer (Cheng et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.263.pdf
Data
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