Nikhil Kaushik


2021

pdf
Counterfactuals to Control Latent Disentangled Text Representations for Style Transfer
Sharmila Reddy Nangi | Niyati Chhaya | Sopan Khosla | Nikhil Kaushik | Harshit Nyati
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Disentanglement of latent representations into content and style spaces has been a commonly employed method for unsupervised text style transfer. These techniques aim to learn the disentangled representations and tweak them to modify the style of a sentence. In this paper, we propose a counterfactual-based method to modify the latent representation, by posing a ‘what-if’ scenario. This simple and disciplined approach also enables a fine-grained control on the transfer strength. We conduct experiments with the proposed methodology on multiple attribute transfer tasks like Sentiment, Formality and Excitement to support our hypothesis.