In plain words: A system first labels the style bits in a sentence, then rewrites it in a polite tone while keeping the original meaning. Across six style-transfer tasks it preserved meaning better than the best earlier systems and won human ratings for grammar, meaning, and politeness.
Abstract
This paper introduces a new task of politeness transfer which involves converting non-polite sentences to polite sentences while preserving the meaning. We also provide a dataset of more than 1.39 instances automatically labeled for politeness to encourage benchmark evaluations on this new task. We design a tag and generate pipeline that identifies stylistic attributes and subsequently generates a sentence in the target style while preserving most of the source content. For politeness as well as five other transfer tasks, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on automatic metrics for content preservation, with a comparable or better performance on style transfer accuracy. Additionally, our model surpasses existing methods on human evaluations for grammaticality, meaning preservation and transfer accuracy across all the six style transfer tasks. The data and code is located at https://github.com/tag-and-generate.
Aman Madaan, Amrith Setlur, Tanmay Parekh, Barnabas Poczos, Graham Neubig, Yiming Yang, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Alan W Black, Shrimai Prabhumoye
arXiv:2004.14257 · cs.CL · submitted Apr 29, 2020 · updated May 1, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · To appear at ACL 2020