Evaluating Style Transfer for Text

Remi Mir, Bjarke Felbo, Nick Obradovich, Iyad Rahwan


Abstract
Research in the area of style transfer for text is currently bottlenecked by a lack of standard evaluation practices. This paper aims to alleviate this issue by experimentally identifying best practices with a Yelp sentiment dataset. We specify three aspects of interest (style transfer intensity, content preservation, and naturalness) and show how to obtain more reliable measures of them from human evaluation than in previous work. We propose a set of metrics for automated evaluation and demonstrate that they are more strongly correlated and in agreement with human judgment: direction-corrected Earth Mover’s Distance, Word Mover’s Distance on style-masked texts, and adversarial classification for the respective aspects. We also show that the three examined models exhibit tradeoffs between aspects of interest, demonstrating the importance of evaluating style transfer models at specific points of their tradeoff plots. We release software with our evaluation metrics to facilitate research.
Anthology ID:
N19-1049
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
495–504
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1049
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1049
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Remi Mir, Bjarke Felbo, Nick Obradovich, and Iyad Rahwan. 2019. Evaluating Style Transfer for Text. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 495–504, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Style Transfer for Text (Mir et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1049.pdf
Code
 passeul/style-transfer-model-evaluation