Style Transfer for Texts: Retrain, Report Errors, Compare with Rewrites

Alexey Tikhonov, Viacheslav Shibaev, Aleksander Nagaev, Aigul Nugmanova, Ivan P. Yamshchikov


Abstract
This paper shows that standard assessment methodology for style transfer has several significant problems. First, the standard metrics for style accuracy and semantics preservation vary significantly on different re-runs. Therefore one has to report error margins for the obtained results. Second, starting with certain values of bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) between input and output and accuracy of the sentiment transfer the optimization of these two standard metrics diverge from the intuitive goal of the style transfer task. Finally, due to the nature of the task itself, there is a specific dependence between these two metrics that could be easily manipulated. Under these circumstances, we suggest taking BLEU between input and human-written reformulations into consideration for benchmarks. We also propose three new architectures that outperform state of the art in terms of this metric.
Anthology ID:
D19-1406
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:
3936–3945
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1406
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1406
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexey Tikhonov, Viacheslav Shibaev, Aleksander Nagaev, Aigul Nugmanova, and Ivan P. Yamshchikov. 2019. Style Transfer for Texts: Retrain, Report Errors, Compare with Rewrites. 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 3936–3945, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Style Transfer for Texts: Retrain, Report Errors, Compare with Rewrites (Tikhonov et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1406.pdf
Data
YelpYelp Review Polarity