Emily Reif1∗ Daphne Ippolito1,2* Ann Yuan1 Andy Coenen1 Chris Callison-Burch2 Jason Wei1

1Google Research     ²University of Pennsylvania

{ereif, annyuan, andycoenen, jasonwei}@google.com

{daphnei, ccb}@seas.upenn.edu

Abstract

In this paper, we leverage large language models (LMs) to perform zero-shot text style transfer. We present a prompting method that we call augmented zero-shot learning, which frames style transfer as a sentence rewriting task and requires only a natural language instruction, without model fine-tuning or exemplars in the target style. Augmented zero-shot learning is simple and demonstrates promising results not just on standard style transfer tasks such as sentiment, but also on natural language transformations such as “make this melodramatic” or “insert a metaphor.”

1        Introduction

Text style transfer is the task of rewriting text to incorporate additional or alternative stylistic elements while preserving the overall semantics and structure. Although style transfer has garnered in- creased interest due to the success of deep learing, these approaches usually require a substantial amount of labeled training examples, either as parallel text data (Zhu et al., 2010; Rao and Tetreault, 2018) or non-parallel text data of a single style. (Li et al., 2018; Jin et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2020; Krishna et al., 2020). Even bleeding-edge approaches that tackle the challenging problem of label-free style transfer are limited in that they require at least several exemplar sentences that dictate a given tar- get style (Xu et al., 2020; Riley et al., 2021). Hence, recent survey papers have identified a need for new methods that both reduce the training data requirements and expand the scope of styles supported (Jin et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2020).

In this work, we present augmented zero-shot learning, a prompting method that allows large language models to perform text style transfer to arbitrary styles, without any exemplars in the target style. Our method builds on prior work showing

that sufficiently large LMs such as GPT-3 can per- form various tasks ranging from classification to translation, simply by choosing a clever prompt to prepend to the input text for which the model is asked to continue (Brown et al., 2020; Branwen, 2020). Using a single prompt that provides several demonstrations of sentences being “rewritten” to meet a desired condition, language models can extrapolate and rewrite text in unseen styles. We are thus able to perform style transfer to arbitrary styles such as “make this sentence more comic” or “include the word balloon.”

Augmented zero-shot learning is simple and facilitates the application of style transfer to a wider range of styles than existing work. Our contributions are the following.

1. We propose a recipe for style transfer using large LMs that is label-free, training-free, and intu- itively controllable.
2. Via human evaluation, we find that our method achieves strong performance on both standard and non-standard style transfer tasks. We also compare our approach for sentiment transfer with prior methods using automatic evaluation.
3. We explore real-world desired style transfers generated from users of a text editing UI that

2        Augmented zero-shot prompting

Although large LMs are trained only for continuation, recent work has shown that they can perform a variety of NLP tasks by expressing the task as a prompt that encourages the model to output the desired answer as the continuation (Puri and Catanzaro, 2019; Weller et al., 2020; Brown et al., 2020; Schick and Schütze, 2021, inter alia; see Liu et al. (2021a) for a survey). The simplest approach, zero- shot prompting, directly uses natural language to ask the large LM to perform a task, as shown in Figure 1a. Zero-shot prompting, however, can be prone to failure modes such as not returning well- formatted or logical outputs (see §6). Few-shot prompting, as shown in Figure 1b, has been shown to achieve higher performance, but requires exemplars for the exact task that we want the model to perform. Such few-shot examples can be easily obtained if the desired style transformation is known ahead of time, but this ultimately limits style transfer to a set of pre-specified style tasks.

To remove the need for these labeled exemplars for each style transfer task, we propose augmented zero-shot learning, a method for performing multi- task style transfer using a single set of exemplars. Instead of prompting the model with exemplars specific to the exact style transfer task we wish to perform, we prompt the model with examples of a variety of sentence rewriting operations, as shown in Figure 1c. This intuition is inspired by Reynolds and McDonell (2021)’s observation that successful prompts constrain the behavior of the large LM away from failure modes—in our case, we aim to preserve the flexibility of a zero shot prompt while encouraging the model to produce outputs of a specific template. We keep the the format of the exemplars constant and insert the de

sired sentence transformation into the same format. In this way, the augmented zero-shot formulation supports arbitrary sentence rewriting tasks without the need to write any task-specific exemplars. Thus, it works for a wide range of styles, including modifying the text to be “more melodramatic,” “insert a metaphor,” or “include the word balloon.”

3        Experimental Setup

Style transfer tasks. We consider six style transfer tasks that we deem non-standard, listed in Table 1. These styles were chosen to be representative of most frequent style adjustments made by users of an AI-assisted text editor that employs our method (discussed further in §5). As source sentences, we use 50 sentences randomly drawn from the Reddit Writing Prompts validation set (Fan et al., 2018), excluding those that already clearly exhibited one of the styles or were ungrammatical/incoherent. We use human evaluation for these styles, since not all styles have readily available classifiers.

We also evaluate our method on two standard style transfer tasks: sentiment and formality. We use the Yelp polarity dataset (Zhang et al., 2015) for sentiment and Grammarly’s Yahoo Answers Formality Corpus (GYAFC) dataset for formality (Rao and Tetreault, 2018).¹ These datasets allow us to evaluate performance of augmented zero-shot learning in the context of prior supervised methods which have been used on these tasks.

Model. Augmented zero-shot learning requires a large language model. We primarily use LaMDA, a left-to-right decoder-only transformer language model (Vaswani et al., 2017) with a non-embedding parameter count of 137B (Thoppilan et al., 2022). The pre-trained LaMDA model, which we refer to as LLM, was trained on a corpus comprising 1.95B public web documents, including forum and dialog data and Wikipedia. The dataset was tokenized into 2.49T BPE tokens with a SentencePiece vocabulary size of 32K (Kudo and Richardson, 2018). We also use LLM-Dialog, the final LaMDA model which was finetuned on a curated, high-quality subset of data identified to be in a conversational format. Decoding was done with top-k=40. To show that the success of augmented zero-shot learning is not restricted to these two large LMs, we also perform experiments with GPT-3 (Table 8). For GPT-3, decoding was done with nucleus sampling using p=0.6 (Holtzman et al., 2019).

The prompts used for LLM and GPT-3 are shown in Figure 1. For LLM-Dialog, the prompt was in- stead formulated as a conversation between one agent who is requesting rewrites and another who is performing the rewrites. See Table 7 in the Appendix for the full non-abbreviated prompts.

4        Results

4.1        Non-Standard Styles

For our six non-standard styles, we asked six professional raters to assess <input sentence, target style, output sentence> tuples. These raters are fluent in English, live in India, and work full time labeling and evaluating data. To decrease inter-rater discrepancy and ensure that our instructions were clear, we had an initial calibration session where they test-rated a small portion of the data (around 10 datapoints which were then omitted from the results) and asked us any clarifying questions. For each style, we compare outputs from our method plus the three baselines for 50 sentences.

Each tuple was scored by three raters (3,600 rat- ings total) on the following three axes which are standard to textual style transfer (Mir et al., 2019):

(1) transfer strength (the amount that the output actually matches the target style), (2) semantic preservation (whether the underlying meaning of the output text, aside from style, matches that of the input), and (3) fluency (whether the text is coherent and could have been written by a proficient English speaker). Following Sakaguchi and Van Durme

(2018), transfer strength and semantic preservation were rated on a scale from 1–100. A screenshot of the evaluation UI is shown in Figure 5 in the Appendix. Note that the guidelines for semantic preservation are not standardized in prior literature (Briakou et al., 2021); while some evaluations are strict that the outputs cannot contain any more information than the inputs, we asked the annotators not to penalize for meaning transformations which are necessary for the specified transformation. We use dialog-LLM, and compare it with three other methods: (1) zero-shot (a baseline), (2) paraphrase (our normal augmented zero shot prompt, but with the target style of “paraphrased”, as a control) and (3) human (ground-truth transformations written by the authors).

Figure 2 shows these results. We found that the outputs of our method were rated almost as highly as the human-written ground truth for all three evaluations. The zero-shot baseline performed the worst in all categories: 25.4% of the time, it did not return a valid response at all (see §6), compared with 0.6% for augmented zero shot. The strong performance of the paraphrase baseline at fluency and semantic similarity shows that large LMs are capable of generating high quality text that remains true to the input sentence’s meaning. Overall, the average length of the input sentences was 66 characters, whereas the average length of augmented zero-shot outputs was 107 characters. For context, human paraphrase outputs were 82 characters.

For a subset of the tasks, some automatic evaluation was also possible. We found that the “balloon” and “park” transformations successfully inserted the target word 85% of the time. For “more descriptive” and “include a metaphor” the transformed text was, as expected, longer than the original (by 252% and 146% respectively, compared with 165% and 146% for human baselines).

4.2        Standard Styles

To better contextualize the performance of our method with prior methods, we also generated outputs for two standard style transfer tasks: sentiment and formality. Figure 3 shows human evaluations (same setup as before) for our outputs as well as the outputs from two popular prior style transfer methods, Unsup MT (Prabhumoye et al., 2018) and Dual RL (Luo et al., 2019). The outputs from our method were rated comparably to both human generated responses and the two prior methods, using the same rating setup as the non-standard styles, with six outputs and baselines for four styles across 50 sentences, rated independently by three raters, totalling 3,000 total ratings.

Furthermore, following Li et al. (2018) and Sud- hakar et al. (2019), we perform automatic evaluation for sentiment style transfer since there are classifiers available for these styles. We note that although automatic evaluations can diverge from human ratings, they can still be a good proxy as we could not perform human evaluation against every prior method due to time and resource constraints. We automatically evaluate (1) transfer strength using a sentiment classifier from HuggingFace Transformers (Wolf et al., 2020), (2) se- mantic similarity to human examples provided by Luo et al. (2019) via BLEU score, and (3) fluency via perplexity, as measured by GPT-2 (117M).

Table 2 shows these automatic evaluations, with four main takeaways. First, augmented zero-shot prompting achieves high accuracy and low perplexity compared with baselines. The BLEU scores, however, are low, which we believe is because it tends to add additional information to generated sentences (see Appendix B for a deeper analysis). Second, we apply augmented zero-shot learning to GPT-3 175B; these results indicate that augmented zero-shot learning generalizes to another large language model. Third, we vary model size for GPT-3 models, finding that larger size greatly improves style transfer. Fourth, for LLM and LLM-dialog, we find that augmented zero-shot learning substantially outperforms vanilla zero-shot learning and almost reaches the accuracy of five-shot learning.

5        Potential of Arbitrary Styles

One promising application of augmented zero-shot learning is an AI-powered writing assistant that can allow writers to transform their text in arbitrary ways that the writer defines and controls. As a qualitative case study to explore what arbitrary re-write styles may be requested, we built an AI-assisted story-writing editor with a “rewrite as” feature that uses our augmented few-shot method. Our editor has a freeform text box for users to specify how they would like a selection of their story to be rewritten (see Figure 6 in the Appendix). We asked 30 people from a creative writing group to use our UI to write a 100-300 word story, collecting 333 rewrite requests in total. Table 3 shows a subset of these, which were as diverse as asking for the text “to be about mining” or “to be less diabolical.”

6        Limitations and Failure Modes

This section details several qualitative limitations with our method.

Unparsable answers   A frequent problem that arises when using large LMs for other NLP tasks is their outputs cannot be automatically parsed into usable answers. For example, when given a prompt like “Here is some text: that is an ugly dress. Here is a rewrite of the text, which is more positive” LLM-Dialog might return something like “Sounds like you are a great writer!” Similar error modes exist for LLM, which might output something like “Here are more writing tips and tricks.” Other

times, the response contains correct information, but it cannot be automatically parsed (e.g., “a good rewrite might be to say that the dress is pretty.” ) In hindsight, these outputs make a lot of sense: most of the training data of large LMs is not well-formatted pairs of inputs and outputs (Reynolds and McDonell, 2021). See §A for how we dealt with these issues.

Hallucinations Large LMs are known to hallucinate text content; we saw this happen frequently for style transfer. While this is an advantage in some contexts like creative writing, it is undesirable for applications like summarization.

Inherent style trends We also noticed that even our “paraphrase” baseline, where the model was simply asked to rewrite the input sentence, was rated highly for style strength for a few styles, including “more formal” and “more melodramatic”. This implies that our method’s generations generally trend toward these styles. A direction for future work would be to see what styles and qualities of text our method (and large LMs in general) are inherently more likely to produce.

Less reliable than trained methods For style transfer tasks that have available training data, prior methods that either train or finetune on that data are going to be inherently more reliable at producing text that looks like their training data. This can be observed in the lower BLEU scores our method achieves than trained methods, despite comparable transfer accuracy (Section B). Thus, augmented zero-shot learning offers less fine-grained control- lability in the properties of the style-transferred text than methods which see task-specific training data.

Large LM safety concerns Large LMs themselves come with their own host of difficulties, barriers to entry, and potential safety concerns as discussed by Bender et al. (2021), which are also valid for this style transfer method. However, we also think that this method can be a useful tool in exploring and exposing the safety and boundaries of these models themselves: what happens if we try to force the large LM to make a text “more racist”, “more sexist”, or “more incendiary”? It is important to keep pushing these models to their boundaries to see where they fail and where problems arise, and specific use cases that show a broader range of the model’s capabilities also show a broader range of its failure modes.

7    Conclusions

We introduced augmented zero-shot learning, which we find shows shows strikingly promising performance considering its simplicity. This prompting paradigm moves the needle in text style transfer by expanding the range of possible styles beyond the currently limited set of styles for which annotated data exists. More broadly, we also hope that the strategy of prompting a large LM with non- task specific examples can inspire new inference- only methods for other NLP tasks.

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Appendix

A         Prompt Selection

A promising new area of prompt engineering has arisen to address the failure modes discussed above, specifically the invalid or unparseable answers. Reynolds and McDonell (2021) find that prompt- ing a model for a task is more akin to locating an already-learned task than truly learning a new one. Moreover, they emphasize that prompt engineer- ing is mostly about avoiding various failure cases such as those described above. In this work, we use delimiters (“{” and “}”) to help avoid these types of errors, giving scores of zero when there was no valid responses with such delimiters. There are other delimiters that could be used (e.g., quotes, “(” and “)”, “<” and “>”, newlines with a colon (as used by GPT-3), etc. We chose curly braces as they were 1) likely to occur in the training data as delim- iters in other contexts and 2) not frequently part of the input sentence itself. We also use a second per- son prompt template for the dialog, which yielded better results as it was more similar to the training data. Exploring these options more quantitatively would be an interesting direction for future work. Because the performance of prompting can vary depending on the exact language of the prompt (Reynolds and McDonell, 2021), we compare four variations of prompts for sentiment: “more positive/negative,” “happier/sadder,” “more opti- mistic/pessimistic,” and “more cheerful/miserable.” As shown in Table 4 in the Appendix, performance differed across the four prompts, but we found them comparable.

B         Low BLEU for LLM Outputs

As we saw in Table 2, the outputs of our model had low BLEU scores with respect to human gen-

erated outputs, while simultaneously having high semantic similarity in human evaluations. Based on qualitative examination of outputs, we believe that this is because model outputs often, despite having high semantic similarity with the source sentence, used different language from human annotations. For instance, for transferring the sentiment of “ever since joes has changed hands it’s just gotten worse and worse” to positive sentiment, our augmented zero-shot learning model outputted “the establishment has continued to provide excellent service, improving steadily since its change of ownership.” This will have low BLEU with the ground truth with respect to human references, which is simply “ever since joes has changed hands it’s just gotten better and better.”

Though we do not see this as an inherent problem, increasing the BLEU for the purposes of comparison can be done in an easy way via candidate selection, as our model returns sixteen possible continuations. In applications for which we prefer model outputs to have high lexical similarity to the source sentence, we could select the candidate of the sixteen with the highest BLEU score compared with the original source sentence. We find that this candidate selection step can substantially improve the BLEU score with the ground truth target sentences, as we show in Table 8.

C         Further Related Work

Style transfer has gained increasing attention in the NLP landscape, for which neural models have been trained to perform style transfer for styles including sentiment, formality, politeness, gender, and politi-

cal slant (Prabhumoye et al., 2018; Madaan et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2021b). We will briefly summarize the primary approaches to style transfer here, and refer the involved reader to either (Jin et al., 2020) or (Hu et al., 2020) for a survey.

Most text style transfer approaches fall in two categories. Early approaches tend to require parallel text data (Zhu et al., 2010; Rao and Tetreault, 2018), where every input in the source style has a corresponding output in the target style. Though this formulation elegantly fits the standard encoder– decoder paradigm, the availability of a parallel text corpus is a stringent requirement. Hence, recent text style transfer approaches have instead used non-parallel monostyle data (no one-to-one- mapping between instances in the source and target styles). Such methods include latent representation manipulation (Liu et al., 2020), prototype-based text editing (Li et al., 2018), and pseudo-parallel corpus construction (Jin et al., 2019). However, even non-parallel monostyle data can be hard to collect for arbitrary styles. As such, surveys have called for more research on approaches that expand the scope of supported styles and reduce the training data requirements for style transfer systems (Jin et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2020).

Several new methods tackle the challenging problem of label-free style transfer, which does not require a full corpus of labeled data, but rather just a few exemplars that define a style. Xu et al. (2020) use variational autoencoders for unsupervised learning of controllable representations for

text. Riley et al. (2021) extract a style vector from a set of target texts and use this vector to condition the decoder to perform style transfer to a target style. These approaches have a similar goal to ours in terms of expanding the scope of possible style transfers. However, they are different in two main ways. First, they require a fully specialized model, where our method can be applied out-of-the-box with something like GPT-3. This can either be a strength or weakness, depending on the availability of such a model. Second, they require exemplars to define a style rather than a plain text description.