Counterfactuals to Control Latent Disentangled Text Representations for Style Transfer

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.