Positive Text Reframing under Multi-strategy Optimization

Shutong Jia, Biwei Cao, Qingqing Gao, Jiuxin Cao, Bo Liu


Abstract
Differing from sentiment transfer, positive reframing seeks to substitute negative perspectives with positive expressions while preserving the original meaning. With the emergence of pre-trained language models (PLMs), it is possible to achieve acceptable results by fine-tuning PLMs. Nevertheless, generating fluent, diverse and task-constrained reframing text remains a significant challenge. To tackle this issue, a **m**ulti-**s**trategy **o**ptimization **f**ramework (MSOF) is proposed in this paper. Starting from the objective of positive reframing, we first design positive sentiment reward and content preservation reward to encourage the model to transform the negative expressions of the original text while ensuring the integrity and consistency of the semantics. Then, different decoding optimization approaches are introduced to improve the quality of text generation. Finally, based on the modeling formula of positive reframing, we propose a multi-dimensional re-ranking method that further selects candidate sentences from three dimensions: strategy consistency, text similarity and fluency. Extensive experiments on two Seq2Seq PLMs, BART and T5, demonstrate our framework achieves significant improvements on unconstrained and controlled positive reframing tasks.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
429–447
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.29/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shutong Jia, Biwei Cao, Qingqing Gao, Jiuxin Cao, and Bo Liu. 2025. Positive Text Reframing under Multi-strategy Optimization. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 429–447, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Positive Text Reframing under Multi-strategy Optimization (Jia et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.29.pdf