IMaT: Unsupervised Text Attribute Transfer via Iterative Matching and Translation

Zhijing Jin, Di Jin, Jonas Mueller, Nicholas Matthews, Enrico Santus


Abstract
Text attribute transfer aims to automatically rewrite sentences such that they possess certain linguistic attributes, while simultaneously preserving their semantic content. This task remains challenging due to a lack of supervised parallel data. Existing approaches try to explicitly disentangle content and attribute information, but this is difficult and often results in poor content-preservation and ungrammaticality. In contrast, we propose a simpler approach, Iterative Matching and Translation (IMaT), which: (1) constructs a pseudo-parallel corpus by aligning a subset of semantically similar sentences from the source and the target corpora; (2) applies a standard sequence-to-sequence model to learn the attribute transfer; (3) iteratively improves the learned transfer function by refining imperfections in the alignment. In sentiment modification and formality transfer tasks, our method outperforms complex state-of-the-art systems by a large margin. As an auxiliary contribution, we produce a publicly-available test set with human-generated transfer references.
Anthology ID:
D19-1306
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3097–3109
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1306
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1306
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhijing Jin, Di Jin, Jonas Mueller, Nicholas Matthews, and Enrico Santus. 2019. IMaT: Unsupervised Text Attribute Transfer via Iterative Matching and Translation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 3097–3109, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
IMaT: Unsupervised Text Attribute Transfer via Iterative Matching and Translation (Jin et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1306.pdf
Code
 zhijing-jin/IMaT +  additional community code