Structured Content Preservation for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer

Youzhi Tian, Zhiting Hu, Zhou Yu

Abstract: Text style transfer aims to modify the style of a sentence while keeping its content unchanged. Recent style transfer systems often fail to faithfully preserve the content after changing the style. This paper proposes a structured content preserving model that leverages linguistic information in the structured fine-grained supervisions to better preserve the style-independent content \footnote{Henceforth, we refer to style-independent content as content, for simplicity.} during style transfer. In particular, we achieve the goal by devising rich model objectives based on both the sentence's lexical information and a language model that conditions on content. The resulting model therefore is encouraged to retain the semantic meaning of the target sentences. We perform extensive experiments that compare our model to other existing approaches in the tasks of sentiment and political slant transfer. Our model achieves significant improvement in terms of both content preservation and style transfer in automatic and human evaluation.

Keywords: Unsupervised text style transfer

Community Implementations: [ 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1810.06526/code)