Engagement-driven Persona Prompting for Rewriting News Tweets

Reshmi Gopalakrishna Pillai, Antske Fokkens, Wouter van Atteveldt


Abstract
Text style transfer is a challenging research task which modifies the linguistic style of a given text to meet pre-set objectives such as making the text simpler or more accessible. Though large language models have been found to give promising results, text rewriting to improve audience engagement of social media content is vastly unexplored. Our research investigates the performance of various prompting strategies in the task of rewriting Dutch news tweets in specific linguistic styles (formal, casual and factual). Apart from zero-shot and few-shot prompting variants, with and without personas, we also explore prompting with feedback on predicted engagement. We perform an extensive analysis of 18 different combinations of Large Language Models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Mistral-7B) and prompting strategies on three different metrics: ROUGE-L, semantic similarity and predicted engagement. We find that GPT-4 with feedback and persona prompting performs the best in terms of predicted engagement for all three language styles. Our results motivate further application of usage of prompting techniques to rewrite news headlines on Twitter to align with specific style guidelines.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.576
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:
8612–8622
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.576/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Reshmi Gopalakrishna Pillai, Antske Fokkens, and Wouter van Atteveldt. 2025. Engagement-driven Persona Prompting for Rewriting News Tweets. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8612–8622, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Engagement-driven Persona Prompting for Rewriting News Tweets (Gopalakrishna Pillai et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.576.pdf