TinyStyler: Efficient Few-Shot Text Style Transfer with Authorship Embeddings

Zachary Horvitz, Ajay Patel, Kanishk Singh, Chris Callison-Burch, Kathleen McKeown, Zhou Yu


Abstract
The goal of text style transfer is to transform the style of texts while preserving their original meaning, often with only a few examples of the target style. Existing style transfer methods generally rely on the few-shot capabilities of large language models or on complex controllable text generation approaches that are inefficient and underperform on fluency metrics. We introduce TinyStyler, a lightweight but effective approach, which leverages a small language model (800M params) and pre-trained authorship embeddings to perform efficient, few-shot text style transfer. We evaluate on the challenging task of authorship style transfer and find TinyStyler outperforms strong approaches such as GPT-4. We also evaluate TinyStyler’s ability to perform text attribute style transfer (formal informal) with automatic and human evaluations and find that the approach outperforms recent controllable text generation methods.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.781
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13376–13390
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.781/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.781
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zachary Horvitz, Ajay Patel, Kanishk Singh, Chris Callison-Burch, Kathleen McKeown, and Zhou Yu. 2024. TinyStyler: Efficient Few-Shot Text Style Transfer with Authorship Embeddings. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 13376–13390, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TinyStyler: Efficient Few-Shot Text Style Transfer with Authorship Embeddings (Horvitz et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.781.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-emnlp.781.software.zip