Meta-Tuning LLMs to Leverage Lexical Knowledge for Generalizable Language Style Understanding

Ruohao Guo, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter


Abstract
Language style is often used by writers to convey their intentions, identities, and mastery of language. In this paper, we show that current large language models struggle to capture some language styles without fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we investigate whether LLMs can be meta-trained based on representative lexicons to recognize new styles they have not been fine-tuned on. Experiments on 13 established style classification tasks, as well as 63 novel tasks generated using LLMs, demonstrate that meta-training with style lexicons consistently improves zero-shot transfer across styles. We release the code and data at https://github.com/octaviaguo/Style-LLM.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.740
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13708–13731
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.740
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruohao Guo, Wei Xu, and Alan Ritter. 2024. Meta-Tuning LLMs to Leverage Lexical Knowledge for Generalizable Language Style Understanding. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13708–13731, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Meta-Tuning LLMs to Leverage Lexical Knowledge for Generalizable Language Style Understanding (Guo et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.740.pdf