On Text Style Transfer via Style-Aware Masked Language Models

Sharan Narasimhan, Pooja H, Suvodip Dey, Maunendra Sankar Desarkar


Abstract
Text Style Transfer (TST) is performable through approaches such as latent space disentanglement, cycle-consistency losses, prototype editing etc. The prototype editing approach, which is known to be quite successful in TST, involves two key phases a) Masking of source style-associated tokens and b) Reconstruction of this source-style masked sentence conditioned with the target style. We follow a similar transduction method, in which we transpose the more difficult direct source to target TST task to a simpler Style-Masked Language Model (SMLM) Task, wherein, similar to BERT (CITATION), the goal of our model is now to reconstruct the source sentence from its style-masked version. We arrive at the SMLM mechanism naturally by formulating prototype editing/ transduction methods in a probabilistic framework, where TST resolves into estimating a hypothetical parallel dataset from a partially observed parallel dataset, wherein each domain is assumed to have a common latent style-masked prior. To generate this style-masked prior, we use “Explainable Attention” as our choice of attribution for a more precise style-masking step and also introduce a cost-effective and accurate “Attribution-Surplus” method of determining the position of masks from any arbitrary attribution model in O(1) time. We empirically show that this non-generational approach well suites the “content preserving” criteria for a task like TST, even for a complex style like Discourse Manipulation. Our model, the Style MLM, outperforms strong TST baselines and is on par with state-of-the-art TST models, which use complex architectures and orders of more parameters.
Anthology ID:
2023.inlg-main.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th International Natural Language Generation Conference
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Prague, Czechia
Editors:
C. Maria Keet, Hung-Yi Lee, Sina Zarrieß
Venues:
INLG | SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
362–374
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.inlg-main.25
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.inlg-main.25
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sharan Narasimhan, Pooja H, Suvodip Dey, and Maunendra Sankar Desarkar. 2023. On Text Style Transfer via Style-Aware Masked Language Models. In Proceedings of the 16th International Natural Language Generation Conference, pages 362–374, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On Text Style Transfer via Style-Aware Masked Language Models (Narasimhan et al., INLG-SIGDIAL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.inlg-main.25.pdf