Even with various regulations in place across countries and social media platforms (Government of India, 2021; European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022, digital abusive speech remains a significant issue. One potential approach to address this challenge is automatic text detoxification, a text style transfer (TST) approach that transforms toxic language into a more neutral or non-toxic form. To date, the availability of parallel corpora for the text detoxification task (Logachevavet al., 2022; Atwell et al., 2022; Dementievavet al., 2024a) has proven to be crucial for state-of-the-art approaches. With this work, we extend parallel text detoxification corpus to new languages -- German, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Amharic -- testing in the extensive multilingual setup TST baselines. Next, we conduct the first of its kind an automated, explainable analysis of the descriptive features of both toxic and non-toxic sentences, diving deeply into the nuances, similarities, and differences of toxicity and detoxification across 9 languages. Finally, based on the obtained insights, we experiment with a novel text detoxification method inspired by the Chain-of-Thoughts reasoning approach, enhancing the prompting process through clustering on relevant descriptive attributes.
Text style transfer (TST) aims to modify the style of a text without altering its original meaning. Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate superior performance across multiple tasks, including TST. However, in zero-shot setups, they tend to directly copy a significant portion of the input text to the output without effectively changing its style. To enhance the stylistic variety and fluency of the text, we present sNeuron-TST, a novel approach for steering LLMs using style-specific neurons in TST. Specifically, we identify neurons associated with the source and target styles and deactivate source-style-only neurons to give target-style words a higher probability, aiming to enhance the stylistic diversity of the generated text. However, we find that this deactivation negatively impacts the fluency of the generated text, which we address by proposing an improved contrastive decoding method that accounts for rapid token probability shifts across layers caused by deactivated source-style neurons. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on six benchmarks, encompassing formality, toxicity, politics, politeness, authorship, and sentiment.
Accurate text segmentation results are crucial for text-related generative tasks, such as text image generation, text editing, text removal, and text style transfer. Recently, some scene text segmentation methods have made significant progress in segmenting regular text. However, these methods perform poorly in scenarios containing artistic text. Therefore, this paper focuses on the more challenging task of artistic text segmentation and constructs a real artistic text segmentation dataset. One challenge of the task is that the local stroke shapes of artistic text are changeable with diversity and complexity. We propose a decoder with the layer-wise momentum query to prevent the model from ignoring stroke regions of special shapes. Another challenge is the complexity of the global topological structure. We further design a skeleton-assisted head to guide the model to focus on the global structure. Additionally, to enhance the generalization performance of the text segmentation model, we propose a strategy for training data synthesis, based on the large multi-modal model and the diffusion model. Experimental results show that our proposed method and synthetic dataset can significantly enhance the performance of artistic text segmentation and achieve state-of-the-art results on other public datasets.
With the advent of foundation models, prompt tuning has positioned itself as an important technique for directing model behaviors and eliciting desired responses. Prompt tuning regards selecting appropriate keywords included into the input, thereby adapting to the downstream task without adjusting or fine-tuning the model parameters. There is a wide range of work in prompt tuning, from approaches that directly harness the backpropagated gradient signals from the model, to those employing black-box optimization such as reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Our primary focus is on RLPrompt, which aims to find optimal prompt tokens leveraging soft Q-learning. While the results show promise, we have observed that the prompts frequently appear unnatural, which impedes their interpretability. We address this limitation by using sparse Tsallis entropy regularization, a principled approach to filtering out unlikely tokens from consideration. We extensively evaluate our approach across various tasks, including few-shot text classification, unsupervised text style transfer, and textual inversion from images. The results indicate a notable improvement over baselines, highlighting the efficacy of our approach in addressing the challenges of prompt tuning. Moreover, we show that the prompts discovered using our method are more natural and interpretable compared to those from other baselines.
The goal of text style transfer is to transform the style of texts while preserving their original meaning, often with only a few examples of the target style. Existing style transfer methods generally rely on the few-shot capabilities of large language models or on complex controllable text generation approaches that are inefficient and underperform on fluency metrics. We introduce TinyStyler, a lightweight but effective approach, which leverages a small language model (800M params) and pre-trained authorship embeddings to perform efficient, few-shot text style transfer. We evaluate on the challenging task of authorship style transfer and find TinyStyler outperforms strong approaches such as GPT-4. We also evaluate TinyStyler's ability to perform text attribute style transfer (formal $\leftrightarrow$ informal) with automatic and human evaluations and find that the approach outperforms recent controllable text generation methods. Our model has been made publicly available at https://huggingface.co/tinystyler/tinystyler .
Numerous recent techniques for text style transfer characterize their approaches as variants of reinforcement learning and preference optimization. In this work, we consider the relationship between these approaches and a class of optimization approaches developed primarily for (non-neural) statistical machine translation, formerly known as `tuning'. Inspired by these techniques from the past, we improve upon established preference optimization approaches, incorporating multiple iterations of exploration and optimization, and choosing contrastive examples by following a `hope' vs `fear' sampling strategy. Cognizant of the difference between machine translation and style transfer, however, we further tailor our framework with a new pseudo-parallel generation method and a dynamic weighted reward aggregation method to tackle the lack of parallel data and the need for a multi-objective reward. We evaluate our model on two commonly used text style transfer datasets. Through automatic and human evaluation results we show the effectiveness and the superiority of our model compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
We analyze the performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text Style Transfer (TST), specifically focusing on sentiment transfer and text detoxification across three languages: English, Hindi, and Bengali. Text Style Transfer involves modifying the linguistic style of a text while preserving its core content. We evaluate the capabilities of pre-trained LLMs using zero-shot and few-shot prompting as well as parameter-efficient finetuning on publicly available datasets. Our evaluation using automatic metrics, GPT-4 and human evaluations reveals that while some prompted LLMs perform well in English, their performance in on other languages (Hindi, Bengali) remains average. However, finetuning significantly improves results compared to zero-shot and few-shot prompting, making them comparable to previous state-of-the-art. This underscores the necessity of dedicated datasets and specialized models for effective TST.
Text style transfer (TST) involves altering the linguistic style of a text while preserving its core content. This paper focuses on sentiment transfer, a popular TST subtask, across a spectrum of Indian languages: Hindi, Magahi, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Odia, Telugu, and Urdu, expanding upon previous work on English-Bangla sentiment transfer (Mukherjee et al., 2023). We introduce dedicated datasets of 1,000 positive and 1,000 negative style-parallel sentences for each of these eight languages. We then evaluate the performance of various benchmark models categorized into parallel, non-parallel, cross-lingual, and shared learning approaches, including the Llama2 and GPT-3.5 large language models (LLMs). Our experiments highlight the significance of parallel data in TST and demonstrate the effectiveness of the Masked Style Filling (MSF) approach (Mukherjee et al., 2023) in non-parallel techniques. Moreover, cross-lingual and joint multilingual learning methods show promise, offering insights into selecting optimal models tailored to the specific language and task requirements. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first comprehensive exploration of the TST task as sentiment transfer across a diverse set of languages.
This paper focuses on text detoxification, i.e., automatically converting toxic text into non-toxic text. This task contributes to safer and more respectful online communication and can be considered a Text Style Transfer (TST) task, where the text style changes while its content is preserved. We present three approaches: knowledge transfer from a similar task, multi-task learning approach, combining sequence-to-sequence modeling with various toxicity classification tasks, and delete and reconstruct approach. To support our research, we utilize a dataset provided by Dementieva et al.(2021), which contains multiple versions of detoxified texts corresponding to toxic texts. In our experiments, we selected the best variants through expert human annotators, creating a dataset where each toxic sentence is paired with a single, appropriate detoxified version. Additionally, we introduced a small Hindi parallel dataset, aligning with a part of the English dataset, suitable for evaluation purposes. Our results demonstrate that our approach effectively balances text detoxication while preserving the actual content and maintaining fluency.
Text style transfer is increasingly prominent in online entertainment and social media. However, existing research mainly concentrates on style transfer within individual English sentences, while ignoring the complexity of long Chinese texts, which limits the wider applicability of style transfer in digital media realm. To bridge this gap, we propose a Chinese Article-style Transfer framework (CAT-LLM), leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). CAT-LLM incorporates a bespoke, pluggable Text Style Definition (TSD) module aimed at comprehensively analyzing text features in articles, prompting LLMs to efficiently transfer Chinese article-style. The TSD module integrates a series of machine learning algorithms to analyze article-style from both words and sentences levels, thereby aiding LLMs thoroughly grasp the target style without compromising the integrity of the original text. In addition, this module supports dynamic expansion of internal style trees, showcasing robust compatibility and allowing flexible optimization in subsequent research. Moreover, we select five Chinese articles with distinct styles and create five parallel datasets using ChatGPT, enhancing the models' performance evaluation accuracy and establishing a novel paradigm for evaluating subsequent research on article-style transfer. Extensive experimental results affirm that CAT-LLM outperforms current research in terms of transfer accuracy and content preservation, and has remarkable applicability to various types of LLMs.
Language style is necessary for AI systems to understand and generate diverse human language accurately. However, previous text style transfer primarily focused on sentence-level data-driven approaches, limiting exploration of potential problems in large language models (LLMs) and the ability to meet complex application needs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel task called Public-Speaking Style Transfer (PSST), which aims to simulate humans to transform passage-level, official texts into a public-speaking style. Grounded in the analysis of real-world data from a linguistic perspective, we decompose public-speaking style into key sub-styles to pose challenges and quantify the style modeling capability of LLMs. For such intricate text style transfer, we further propose a fine-grained evaluation framework to analyze the characteristics and identify the problems of stylized texts. Comprehensive experiments suggest that current LLMs struggle to generate public speaking texts that align with human preferences, primarily due to excessive stylization and loss of semantic information.
While text style transfer has many applications across natural language processing, the core premise of transferring from a single source style is unrealistic in a real-world setting. In this work, we focus on arbitrary style transfer: rewriting a text from an arbitrary, unknown style to a target style. We propose STEER: Unified Style Transfer with Expert Reinforcement, a unified frame-work developed to overcome the challenge of limited parallel data for style transfer. STEER involves automatically generating a corpus of style-transfer pairs using a product of experts during decoding. The generated offline data is then used to pre-train an initial policy before switching to online, off-policy reinforcement learning for further improvements via fine-grained reward signals. STEER is unified and can transfer to multiple target styles from an arbitrary, unknown source style, making it particularly flexible and efficient. Experimental results on a challenging dataset with text from a diverse set of styles demonstrate state-of-the-art results compared to competitive baselines. Remarkably, STEER outperforms the 175B parameter instruction-tuned GPT-3 on overall style transfer quality, despite being 226 times smaller in size. We also show STEER is robust, maintaining its style transfer capabilities on out-of-domain data, and surpassing nearly all baselines across various styles. The success of our method highlights the potential of RL algorithms when augmented with controllable decoding to overcome the challenge of limited data supervision.
Text style transfer is a prominent task that aims to control the style of text without inherently changing its factual content. To cover more text modification applications, such as adapting past news for current events and repurposing educational materials, we propose the task of text fact transfer, which seeks to transfer the factual content of a source text between topics without modifying its style. We find that existing language models struggle with text fact transfer, due to their inability to preserve the specificity and phrasing of the source text, and tendency to hallucinate errors. To address these issues, we design ModQGA, a framework that minimally modifies a source text with a novel combination of end-to-end question generation and specificity-aware question answering. Through experiments on four existing datasets adapted for text fact transfer, we show that ModQGA can accurately transfer factual content without sacrificing the style of the source text.
In this work, we introduce the concept of complex text style transfer tasks, and constructed complex text datasets based on two widely applicable scenarios. Our dataset is the first large-scale data set of its kind, with 700 rephrased sentences and 1,000 sentences from the game Genshin Impact. While large language models (LLM) have shown promise in complex text style transfer, they have drawbacks such as data privacy concerns, network instability, and high deployment costs. To address these issues, we explore the effectiveness of small models (less than T5-3B) with implicit style pre-training through contrastive learning. We also propose a method for automated evaluation of text generation quality based on alignment with human evaluations using ChatGPT. Finally, we compare our approach with existing methods and show that our model achieves state-of-art performances of few-shot text style transfer models.
Text style transfer techniques are gaining popularity in natural language processing allowing paraphrasing text in the required form: from toxic to neural, from formal to informal, from old to the modern English language, etc. Solving the task is not sufficient to generate some neural/informal/modern text, but it is important to preserve the original content unchanged. This requirement becomes even more critical in some applications such as style transfer of goal-oriented dialogues where the factual information shall be kept to preserve the original message, e.g. ordering a certain type of pizza to a certain address at a certain time. The aspect of content preservation is critical for real-world applications of style transfer studies, but it has received little attention. To bridge this gap we perform a comparison of various style transfer models on the example of the formality transfer domain. To perform a study of the content preservation abilities of various style transfer methods we create a parallel dataset of formal vs. informal task-oriented dialogues. The key difference between our dataset and the existing ones like GYAFC [17] is the presence of goal-oriented dialogues with predefined semantic slots essential to be kept during paraphrasing, e.g. named entities. This additional annotation allowed us to conduct a precise comparative study of several state-of-the-art techniques for style transfer. Another result of our study is a modification of the unsupervised method LEWIS [19] which yields a substantial improvement over the original method and all evaluated baselines on the proposed task.
Automatic evaluation of sequence generation, traditionally reliant on metrics like BLEU and ROUGE, often fails to capture the semantic accuracy of generated text sequences due to their emphasis on n-gram overlap. A promising solution to this problem is to develop model-based metrics, such as BLEURT and COMET. However, these approaches are typically hindered by the scarcity of labeled evaluation data, which is necessary to train the evaluation models. In this work, we build upon this challenge by proposing the Customized Sequence Evaluation Metric (CSEM), a three-stage evaluation model training method that utilizes large language models to generate labeled data for model-based metric development, thereby eliminating the need for human-labeled data. Additionally, we expand the scope of CSEM to support various evaluation types, including single-aspect, multi-aspect, reference-free, and reference-based evaluations, enabling the customization of metrics to suit diverse real-world scenarios. Experimental results on the SummEval benchmark demonstrate that CSEM can effectively train an evaluation model without human-labeled data. Further experiments in reinforcement learning and reranking show that metrics developed through CSEM outperform traditional evaluation metrics, leading to substantial improvements in sequence quality as evaluated by both commonly used metrics and ChatGPT.
Unsupervised text style transfer task aims to rewrite a text into target style while preserving its main content. Traditional methods rely on the use of a fixed-sized vector to regulate text style, which is difficult to accurately convey the style strength for each individual token. In fact, each token of a text contains different style intensity and makes different contribution to the overall style. Our proposed method addresses this issue by assigning individual style vector to each token in a text, allowing for fine-grained control and manipulation of the style strength. Additionally, an adversarial training framework integrated with teacher-student learning is introduced to enhance training stability and reduce the complexity of high-dimensional optimization. The results of our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our method in terms of clearly improved style transfer accuracy and content preservation in both two-style transfer and multi-style transfer settings.
Style is an important concept in today's challenges in natural language generating. After the success in the field of image style transfer, the task of text style transfer became actual and attractive. Researchers are also interested in the tasks of style reproducing in generation of the poetic text. Evaluation of style reproducing in natural poetry generation remains a problem. I used 3 character-based LSTM-models to work with style reproducing assessment. All three models were trained on the corpus of texts by famous Russian-speaking poets. Samples were shown to the assessors and 4 answer options were offered, the style of which poet this sample reproduces. In addition, the assessors were asked how well they were familiar with the work of the poet they had named. Students studying history of literature were the assessors, 94 answers were received. It has appeared that accuracy of definition of style increases if the assessor can quote the poet by heart. Each model showed at least 0.7 macro-average accuracy. The experiment showed that it is better to involve a professional rather than a naive reader in the evaluation of style in the tasks of poetry generation, while lstm models are good at reproducing the style of Russian poets even on a limited training corpus.
Back Translation (BT) is widely used in the field of machine translation, as it has been proved effective for enhancing translation quality. However, BT mainly improves the translation of inputs that share a similar style (to be more specific, translation-like inputs), since the source side of BT data is machine-translated. For natural inputs, BT brings only slight improvements and sometimes even adverse effects. To address this issue, we propose Text Style Transfer Back Translation (TST BT), which uses a style transfer model to modify the source side of BT data. By making the style of source-side text more natural, we aim to improve the translation of natural inputs. Our experiments on various language pairs, including both high-resource and low-resource ones, demonstrate that TST BT significantly improves translation performance against popular BT benchmarks. In addition, TST BT is proved to be effective in domain adaptation so this strategy can be regarded as a general data augmentation method. Our training code and text style transfer model are open-sourced.
Diffusion probabilistic models have shown great success in generating high-quality images controllably, and researchers have tried to utilize this controllability into text generation domain. Previous works on diffusion-based language models have shown that they can be trained without external knowledge (such as pre-trained weights) and still achieve stable performance and controllability. In this paper, we trained a diffusion-based model on StylePTB dataset, the standard benchmark for fine-grained text style transfers. The tasks in StylePTB requires much more refined control over the output text compared to tasks evaluated in previous works, and our model was able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on StylePTB on both individual and compositional transfers. Moreover, our model, trained on limited data from StylePTB without external knowledge, outperforms previous works that utilized pretrained weights, embeddings, and external grammar parsers, and this may indicate that diffusion-based language models have great potential under low-resource settings.