Harnessing Pre-Trained Neural Networks with Rules for Formality Style Transfer

Yunli Wang, Yu Wu, Lili Mou, Zhoujun Li, Wenhan Chao


Abstract
Formality text style transfer plays an important role in various NLP applications, such as non-native speaker assistants and child education. Early studies normalize informal sentences with rules, before statistical and neural models become a prevailing method in the field. While a rule-based system is still a common preprocessing step for formality style transfer in the neural era, it could introduce noise if we use the rules in a naive way such as data preprocessing. To mitigate this problem, we study how to harness rules into a state-of-the-art neural network that is typically pretrained on massive corpora. We propose three fine-tuning methods in this paper and achieve a new state-of-the-art on benchmark datasets
Anthology ID:
D19-1365
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3573–3578
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1365
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1365
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yunli Wang, Yu Wu, Lili Mou, Zhoujun Li, and Wenhan Chao. 2019. Harnessing Pre-Trained Neural Networks with Rules for Formality Style Transfer. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 3573–3578, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Harnessing Pre-Trained Neural Networks with Rules for Formality Style Transfer (Wang et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/D19-1365.pdf