Inducing Positive Perspectives with Text Reframing

Caleb Ziems, Minzhi Li, Anthony Zhang, Diyi Yang


Abstract
Sentiment transfer is one popular example of a text style transfer task, where the goal is to reverse the sentiment polarity of a text. With a sentiment reversal comes also a reversal in meaning. We introduce a different but related task called positive reframing in which we neutralize a negative point of view and generate a more positive perspective for the author without contradicting the original meaning. Our insistence on meaning preservation makes positive reframing a challenging and semantically rich task. To facilitate rapid progress, we introduce a large-scale benchmark, Positive Psychology Frames, with 8,349 sentence pairs and 12,755 structured annotations to explain positive reframing in terms of six theoretically-motivated reframing strategies. Then we evaluate a set of state-of-the-art text style transfer models, and conclude by discussing key challenges and directions for future work.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.257
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3682–3700
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.257
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.257
Award:
 Outstanding Paper
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Caleb Ziems, Minzhi Li, Anthony Zhang, and Diyi Yang. 2022. Inducing Positive Perspectives with Text Reframing. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3682–3700, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Inducing Positive Perspectives with Text Reframing (Ziems et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.257.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.257.mp4
Code
 gt-salt/positive-frames