A large-scale computational study of content preservation measures for text style transfer and paraphrase generation

In recent years, researchers in computational linguistics have shown a growing interest in the style of text, with a specific focus on the text style transfer (TST) task. While numerous innovative methods have been proposed, it has been observed that the existing evaluations are insufficient to validate the claims and precisely measure the performance. This challenge primarily stems from rapid advancements and diverse settings of these methods, with the associated (re)implementation and reproducibility hurdles. To bridge this gap, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark for TST known as TSTBench. TSTBench includes a codebase encompassing implementations of 13 state-of-the-art algorithms and a standardized protocol for text style transfer. Based on the codebase and protocol, we have conducted thorough experiments across seven datasets, resulting in a total of 7000+ evaluations. Our work provides extensive analysis from various perspectives, explores the performance of representative baselines across various datasets, and offers insights into the task and evaluation processes to guide future research in TST.

Existing text style transfer (TST) methods rely on style classifiers to disentangle the text’s content and style attributes for text style transfer. While the style classifier plays a critical role in existing TST methods, there is no known investigation on its effect on the TST methods. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on the limitations of the style classifiers used in existing TST methods. We demonstrated that the existing style classifiers cannot learn sentence syntax effectively and ultimately worsen existing TST models’ performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Syntax-Aware Controllable Generation (SACG) model, which includes a syntax-aware style classifier that ensures learned style latent representations effectively capture the sentence structure for TST. Through extensive experiments on two popular text style transfer tasks, we show that our proposed method significantly outperforms twelve state-of-the-art methods. Our case studies have also demonstrated SACG’s ability to generate fluent target-style sentences that preserved the original content.

Text style transfer (TST) involves altering the linguistic style of a text while preserving its style-independent 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., 2023a).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., 2023a) in non-parallel techniques.Moreover, crosslingual 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.

We introduce a simple method for text style transfer that frames style transfer as denoising: we synthesize a noisy corpus and treat the source style as a noisy version of the target style. To control for aspects such as preserving meaning while modifying style, we propose a reranking approach in the data synthesis phase. We evaluate our method on three novel style transfer tasks: transferring between British and American varieties, text genres (formal vs. casual), and lyrics from different musical genres. By measuring style transfer quality, meaning preservation, and the fluency of generated outputs, we demonstrate that our method is able both to produce high-quality output while maintaining the flexibility to suggest syntactically rich stylistic edits.

Text style transfer, the aim of which is to convert a specific style in a given sentence to another target style while maintaining the style-independent content information of the original sentence, can face challenges when applied to non-parallel text. In this paper, we combine domain adaptation learning and an attention model to propose a new framework to accomplish the task. Domain adaptation can leverage relative information from the source domain to improve the generative model’s capacity for reconstructing data. The attention model can give the importance weights of generated words for the target style in a sentence; therefore, the generative model can concentrate on generating words with higher importance weights to accomplish text style transfer effectively. We evaluate our framework using Yelp, Amazon and Captions corpora. The results of automatic and human evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework compared with previous works under non-parallel and limited training data. The available codes are in https://github.com/mingxuan007/text-style-transfer-with-adversarial-network-and-domain-adaptation .

Style is an integral component of a sentence indicated by the choice of words a person makes. Different people have different ways of expressing themselves; however, they adjust their speaking and writing style to a social context, an audience, an interlocutor, or the formality of an occasion. Text style transfer is defined as a task of adapting and/or changing the stylistic manner in which a sentence is written, while preserving the meaning of the original sentence. A systematic review of text style transfer methodologies using deep learning is presented in this article. We point out the technological advances in deep neural networks that have been the driving force behind current successes in the fields of natural language understanding and generation. The review is structured around two key stages in the text style transfer process, namely, representation learning and sentence generation in a new style. The discussion highlights the commonalities and differences between proposed solutions as well as challenges and opportunities that are expected to direct and foster further research in the field.

Artistic text style transfer is the task of migrating the style from a source image to the target text to create artistic typography. Recent style transfer methods have considered texture control to enhance usability. However, controlling the stylistic degree in terms of shape deformation remains an important open challenge. In this paper, we present the first text style transfer network that allows for real-time control of the crucial stylistic degree of the glyph through an adjustable parameter. Our key contribution is a novel bidirectional shape matching framework to establish an effective glyph-style mapping at various deformation levels without paired ground truth. Based on this idea, we propose a scale-controllable module to empower a single network to continuously characterize the multi-scale shape features of the style image and transfer these features to the target text. The proposed method demonstrates its superiority over previous state-of-the-arts in generating diverse, controllable and high-quality stylized text.

Text style transfer (TST) without parallel data has achieved some practical success. However, most of the existing unsupervised text style transfer methods suffer from (i) requiring massive amounts of non-parallel data to guide transferring different text styles. (ii) colossal performance degradation when fine-tuning the model in new domains. In this work, we propose DAML-ATM (Domain Adaptive Meta-Learning with Adversarial Transfer Model), which consists of two parts: DAML and ATM. DAML is a domain adaptive meta-learning approach to learning general knowledge in multiple heterogeneous source domains, capable of adapting to new unseen domains with a small amount of data. Moreover, we propose a new unsupervised TST approach Adversarial Transfer Model (ATM), composed of a sequence-to-sequence pre-trained language model and uses adversarial style training for better content preservation and style transfer. Results on multi-domain datasets demonstrate that our approach generalizes well on unseen low-resource domains, achieving state-of-the-art results against ten strong baselines.

In natural language processing (NLP) tasks, computing semantic textual similarity (STS) is crucial for capturing nuanced semantic differences in text. Traditional word vector methods, such as Word2Vec and GloVe, as well as deep learning models like BERT, face limitations in handling context dependency and polysemy and present challenges in computational resources and real-time processing. To address these issues, this paper introduces two novel methods. First, a sentence embedding generation method based on Kullback–Leibler Divergence (KLD) optimization is proposed, which enhances semantic differentiation between sentence vectors, thereby improving the accuracy of textual similarity computation. Second, this study proposes a framework incorporating RoBERTa knowledge distillation, which integrates the deep semantic insights of the RoBERTa model with prior methodologies to enhance sentence embeddings while preserving computational efficiency. Additionally, the study extends its contributions to sentiment analysis tasks by leveraging the enhanced embeddings for classification. The sentiment analysis experiments, conducted using a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) classifier on the ACL IMDB dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, achieving high precision, recall, and F1 score metrics. To further augment model accuracy and efficacy, a feature selection approach is introduced, specifically through the Dynamic Principal Component Selection (DPCS) algorithm. The DPCS method autonomously identifies and prioritizes critical features, thus enriching the expressive capacity of sentence vectors and significantly advancing the accuracy of similarity computations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in semantic similarity computation on the SemEval-2016 dataset. When evaluated using cosine similarity of average vectors, our model achieved a Pearson correlation coefficient (τ) of 0.470, a Spearman correlation coefficient (ρ) of 0.481, and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.100. Compared to traditional methods such as Word2Vec, GloVe, and FastText, our method significantly enhances similarity computation accuracy. Using TF-IDF-weighted cosine similarity evaluation, our model achieved a τ of 0.528, ρ of 0.518, and an MAE of 1.343. Additionally, in the cosine similarity assessment leveraging the Dynamic Principal Component Smoothing (DPCS) algorithm, our model achieved a τ of 0.530, ρ of 0.518, and an MAE of 1.320, further demonstrating the method’s effectiveness and precision in handling semantic similarity. These results indicate that our proposed method has high relevance and low error in semantic textual similarity tasks, thereby better capturing subtle semantic differences between texts.

Unsupervised text style transfer aims to alter text styles while preserving the content, without aligned data for supervision. Existing seq2seq methods face three challenges: 1) the transfer is weakly interpretable, 2) generated outputs struggle in content preservation, and 3) the trade-off between content and style is intractable. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical reinforced sequence operation method, named Point-Then-Operate (PTO), which consists of a high-level agent that proposes operation positions and a low-level agent that alters the sentence. We provide comprehensive training objectives to control the fluency, style, and content of the outputs and a mask-based inference algorithm that allows for multi-step revision based on the single-step trained agents. Experimental results on two text style transfer datasets show that our method significantly outperforms recent methods and effectively addresses the aforementioned challenges.

Although text style transfer has witnessed rapid development in recent years, there is as yet no established standard for evaluation, which is performed using several automatic metrics, lacking the possibility of always resorting to human judgement. We focus on the task of formality transfer, and on the three aspects that are usually evaluated: style strength, content preservation, and fluency. To cast light on how such aspects are assessed by common and new metrics, we run a human-based evaluation and perform a rich correlation analysis. We are then able to offer some recommendations on the use of such metrics in formality transfer, also with an eye to their generalisability (or not) to related tasks.

Semantic Similarity is one of the highest levels of NLP. STS has significant advantages in NLP applications like information retrieval, information extraction, text summarization, data mining, machine translation, and other tasks. This research aims to present a deep learning approach for capturing semantic textual similarity (STS) in the Guragigna. The methodology involves collecting a Guragigna language corpus and preprocessing the text data and text representation is done using the Universal Sentence Encoder (USE), along with word embedding techniques including Word2Vec and GloVe and mean Square Error (MSE) is used to measure the performance. In the experimentation phase, models like LSTM, Bidirectional RNN, GRU, and Stacked RNN are trained and evaluated using different embedding techniques. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the developed models in capturing semantic textual similarity in the Guragigna language. Across different embedding techniques, including Word2Vec, GloVe, and USE, the Bidirectional RNN model with USE embedding achieves the lowest MSE of 0.0950 and the highest accuracy of 0.9244. GloVe and Word2Vec embedding also show competitive performance with slightly higher MSE and lower accuracy. The Universal Sentence Encoder consistently emerges as the top-performing embedding across all RNN architectures. The research results demonstrate the effectiveness of LSTM, GRU, Bi RNN, and Stacked RNN models in measuring semantic textual similarity in the Guragigna language.

Text similarity is one of the important methods of text data analysis, which is often used in text clustering and classification. Social media is a new and popular online social application that contains a lot of valuable information. Short text is common in social media, and short text similarity is often used for social media data mining. The similarity calculation of short text is influenced by the small feature of text words and the accuracy is low. so it is a common improvement method to calculate the similarity of short texts with word semantic similarity. This paper put forward a short text semantic similarity calculation method that combine knowledge-based method and corpus-based method. This method is based on the improved word semantic similarity calculation method and general short text semantic similarity calculation method. The word similarity calculation method combines two word semantic similarity by some strategies. It takes the advantages of two methods to overcome the disadvantages of single one, finds out more semantic association among words in texts, and improves accuracy of word similarity calculation. This paper uses a large number of corpus to compare and analyze several word and text semantic similarity algorithms, the improved method has a closer result to human ratings than other methods in both word and text similarity.

The rapid growth of digital communication in Indonesia has led to a distinct informal linguistic style that poses significant challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems trained on formal text. This discrepancy often degrades the performance of downstream tasks like machine translation and sentiment analysis. This study aims to provide the first systematic comparison of IndoNanoT5 (encoder-decoder) and IndoGPT (decoder-only) architectures for Indonesian informal-to-formal text style transfer. We conduct comprehensive experiments using the STIF-INDONESIA dataset through rigorous hyperparameter optimization, multiple evaluation metrics, and statistical significance testing. The results demonstrate clear superiority of the encoder-decoder architecture, with IndoNanoT5-base achieving a peak BLEU score of 55.99, significantly outperforming IndoGPT's highest score of 51.13 by 4.86 points—a statistically significant improvement (p<0.001) with large effect size (Cohen's d = 0.847). This establishes new performance benchmarks with 28.49 BLEU points improvement over previous methods, representing a 103.6% relative gain. Architectural analysis reveals that bidirectional context processing, explicit input-output separation, and cross-attention mechanisms provide critical advantages for handling Indonesian morphological complexity. Computational efficiency analysis shows important trade-offs between inference speed and output quality. This research advances Indonesian text normalization capabilities and provides empirical evidence for architectural selection in sequence-to-sequence tasks for morphologically rich, low-resource languages.

Abstract. Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP), demonstrating remarkable capabilities in understanding, generating, and manipulating human language. This comprehensive review explores the development, applications, optimizations, and challenges of LLMs. This paper begin by tracing the evolution of these models and their foundational architectures, such as the Transformer, GPT, and BERT. We then delve into the applications of LLMs in natural language understanding tasks, including sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, question answering, and text summarization, highlighting real-world use cases. Next, we examine the role of LLMs in natural language generation, covering areas such as content creation, language translation, personalized recommendations, and automated responses. We further discuss LLM applications in other NLP tasks like text style transfer, text correction, and language model pre-training. Subsequently, we explore techniques for optimizing and improving LLMs, including model compression, explainability, robustness, and security. Finally, we address the challenges posed by the significant computational requirements, sample inefficiency, and ethical considerations surrounding LLMs. We conclude by discussing potential future research directions, such as efficient architectures, few-shot learning, bias mitigation, and privacy-preserving techniques, which will shape the ongoing development and responsible deployment of LLMs in NLP.