LEWIS: Levenshtein Editing for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer

Abstract: Many types of text style transfer can be achieved with only small, precise edits (e.g. sentiment transfer from I had a terrible time... to I had a great time...). We propose a coarse-to-fine editor for style transfer that transforms text using Levenshtein edit operations (e.g. insert, replace, delete). Unlike prior single-span edit methods, our method concurrently edits multiple spans in the source text. To train without parallel style text pairs (e.g. pairs of +/- sentiment statements), we propose an unsupervised data synthesis procedure. We first convert text to style-agnostic templates using style classifier attention (e.g. I had a SLOT time...), then fill in slots in these templates using fine-tuned pretrained LLMs. Our method outperforms existing generation and editing style transfer methods on sentiment (Yelp, Amazon) and politeness (Polite) transfer. In particular, multi-span editing achieves higher performance and more diverse output than single-span editing. Moreover, compared to previous methods on unsupervised data synthesis, our method results in higher quality parallel style pairs and improves model performance.