Style Transfer from Non-Parallel Text by Cross-Alignment

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017)

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Authors

Tianxiao Shen, Tao Lei, Regina Barzilay, Tommi Jaakkola

Abstract

This paper focuses on style transfer on the basis of non-parallel text. This is an instance of a broad family of problems including machine translation, decipherment, and sentiment modification. The key challenge is to separate the content from other aspects such as style. We assume a shared latent content distribution across different text corpora, and propose a method that leverages refined alignment of latent representations to perform style transfer. The transferred sentences from one style should match example sentences from the other style as a population. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this cross-alignment method on three tasks: sentiment modification, decipherment of word substitution ciphers, and recovery of word order.