StoryTrans: Non-Parallel Story Author-Style Transfer with Discourse Representations and Content Enhancing

Xuekai Zhu, Jian Guan, Minlie Huang, Juan Liu


Abstract
Non-parallel text style transfer is an important task in natural language generation. However, previous studies concentrate on the token or sentence level, such as sentence sentiment and formality transfer, but neglect long style transfer at the discourse level. Long texts usually involve more complicated author linguistic preferences such as discourse structures than sentences. In this paper, we formulate the task of non-parallel story author-style transfer, which requires transferring an input story into a specified author style while maintaining source semantics. To tackle this problem, we propose a generation model, named StoryTrans, which leverages discourse representations to capture source content information and transfer them to target styles with learnable style embeddings. We use an additional training objective to disentangle stylistic features from the learned discourse representation to prevent the model from degenerating to an auto-encoder. Moreover, to enhance content preservation, we design a mask-and-fill framework to explicitly fuse style-specific keywords of source texts into generation. Furthermore, we constructed new datasets for this task in Chinese and English, respectively. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms strong baselines in overall performance of style transfer and content preservation.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.827
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14803–14819
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.827
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.827
Award:
 Area Chair Award (Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining)
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuekai Zhu, Jian Guan, Minlie Huang, and Juan Liu. 2023. StoryTrans: Non-Parallel Story Author-Style Transfer with Discourse Representations and Content Enhancing. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14803–14819, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
StoryTrans: Non-Parallel Story Author-Style Transfer with Discourse Representations and Content Enhancing (Zhu et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.827.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.827.mp4