Adversarial Separation Network for Text Style Transfer

This article considers the task of text style transfer: transforming a specific style of sentence into another while preserving its style-independent content. A dominate approach to text style transfer is to learn a good content factor of text, define a fixed vector for every style and recombine them to generate text in the required style. In fact, there are a large number of different words to convey the same style from different aspects. Thus, using a fixed vector to represent one style is very inefficient, which causes the weak representation power of the style vector and limits text diversity of the same style. To address this problem, we propose a novel neural generative model called Adversarial Separation Network (ASN), which can learn the content and style vector jointly and the learnt vectors have strong representation power and good interpretabilities. In our method, adversarial learning is implemented to enhance our model’s capability of disentangling the two factors. To evaluate our method, we conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets. Experimental results show our method can perform style transfer better than strong comparison systems. We also demonstrate the strong interpretability of the learnt latent vectors.