What is wrong with style transfer for texts?

A number of recent machine learning papers work with an automated style transfer for texts and, counter to intuition, demonstrate that there is no consensus formulation of this NLP task. Different researchers propose different algorithms, datasets and target metrics to address it. This short opinion paper aims to discuss possible formalization of this NLP task in anticipation of a further growing interest to it.

[1]  Regina Barzilay,et al.  Style Transfer from Non-Parallel Text by Cross-Alignment , 2017, NIPS.

[2]  Leon A. Gatys,et al.  Image Style Transfer Using Convolutional Neural Networks , 2016, 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[3]  Dima Damen,et al.  Recognizing linked events: Searching the space of feasible explanations , 2009, 2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[4]  Wei Xu,et al.  From Shakespeare to Twitter: What are Language Styles all about? , 2017 .

[5]  Joel R. Tetreault,et al.  Dear Sir or Madam, May I Introduce the GYAFC Dataset: Corpus, Benchmarks and Metrics for Formality Style Transfer , 2018, NAACL.

[6]  Ralph Grishman,et al.  Paraphrasing for Style , 2012, COLING.

[7]  Dongyan Zhao,et al.  Style Transfer in Text: Exploration and Evaluation , 2017, AAAI.

[8]  J. M. Hughes,et al.  Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature , 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[9]  Ye Zhang,et al.  SHAPED: Shared-Private Encoder-Decoder for Text Style Adaptation , 2018, NAACL.

[10]  Jackie Chi Kit Cheung,et al.  Stylistic Transfer in Natural Language Generation Systems Using Recurrent Neural Networks , 2016 .

[12]  Houfeng Wang,et al.  Unpaired Sentiment-to-Sentiment Translation: A Cycled Reinforcement Learning Approach , 2018, ACL.

[13]  Xiang Zhang,et al.  Text Understanding from Scratch , 2015, ArXiv.

[14]  Harsh Jhamtani,et al.  Shakespearizing Modern Language Using Copy-Enriched Sequence to Sequence Models , 2017, Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation.

[15]  Yulia Tsvetkov,et al.  Style Transfer Through Back-Translation , 2018, ACL.

[16]  Eneko Agirre,et al.  Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation , 2017, ICLR.

[17]  Ivan P. Yamshchikov,et al.  Guess who? Multilingual Approach For The Automated Generation Of Author-Stylized Poetry , 2018, 2018 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT).

[18]  Keith Carlson,et al.  Zero-Shot Style Transfer in Text Using Recurrent Neural Networks , 2017, ArXiv.

[19]  Yoav Goldberg,et al.  Controlling Linguistic Style Aspects in Neural Language Generation , 2017, ArXiv.

[20]  Percy Liang,et al.  Delete, Retrieve, Generate: a Simple Approach to Sentiment and Style Transfer , 2018, NAACL.

[21]  Zhendong Niu,et al.  Unsupervised Automatic Text Style Transfer Using LSTM , 2017, NLPCC.