Controlling Linguistic Style Aspects in Neural Language Generation

Most work on neural natural language generation (NNLG) focus on controlling the content of the generated text. We experiment with controlling several stylistic aspects of the generated text, in addition to its content. The method is based on conditioned RNN language model, where the desired content as well as the stylistic parameters serve as conditioning contexts. We demonstrate the approach on the movie reviews domain and show that it is successful in generating coherent sentences corresponding to the required linguistic style and content

Evaluating prose style transfer with the Bible

In the prose style transfer task a system, provided with text input and a target prose style, produces output which preserves the meaning of the input text but alters the style. These systems require parallel data for evaluation of results and usually make use of parallel data for training. Currently, there are few publicly available corpora for this task. In this work, we identify a high-quality source of aligned, stylistically distinct text in different versions of the Bible. We provide a standardized split, into training, development and testing data, of the public domain versions in our corpus. This corpus is highly parallel since many Bible versions are included. Sentences are aligned due to the presence of chapter and verse numbers within all versions of the text. In addition to the corpus, we present the results, as measured by the BLEU and PINC metrics, of several models trained on our data which can serve as baselines for future research. While we present these data as a style transfer corpus, we believe that it is of unmatched quality and may be useful for other natural language tasks as well