Linguistic Individuality Transformation for
Spoken Language
Masahiro Mizukami, Graham Neubig, Sakriani Sakti, Tomoki Toda, and Satoshi
Nakamura

Abstract In text and speech, there are various features that express the individualityof the writer or speaker. In this paper, we take a step towards the creation of dialoguesystems that consider this individuality by proposing a method for transforming
individuality using a technique inspired by statistical machine translation (SMT).
However, finding a parallel corpus with identical semantic content but different individuality is difficult, precluding the use of standard SMT techniques. Thus, in thispaper we focus on methods for creating a translation model (TM) using techniquesfrom the paraphrasing literature, and a language model (LM) by combining small
amounts of individuality-rich data with larger amounts of background text. We perform an automatic and manual evaluation comparing the effectiveness of three typesof TM construction techniques, and find that the proposed system using a method
focusing on a limited set of function words is most effective, and can transform
individuality to a degree that is both noticeable and identifiable.

1 Introduction
In language, the words chosen by the speaker or writer transmit not only semantic
content but also other information such as aspects of their individuality, personality,or speaking style. While not directly related to the message, these aspects of language are extremely important to achieve rapport between the person creating themessage and its intended target. We can assume that this observation will also carryover to human computer interaction [1].
For example, in a situation where a dialogue system is used to represent famous
characters in movies or comics, we would like to reproduce the character’s wellknow and unique expressions. It is also natural that a dialogue system can realizesmoother communication by talking in a more polite way to adults, and a morefriendly and informal way to children [2]. To make these sorts of applications pos-

Masahiro Mizukami, Graham Neubig, Sakriani Sakti, Tomoki Toda, Satoshi Nakamura
NAIST, 8916-5 Takayama-cho, Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan,
e-mail: {masahiro-mi,neubig,ssakti,tomoki,s-nakamura}@is.naist.jp1

2

Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Length

sible, it is necessary the ability to express a rich variety of individuality and atmosphere depending on the type of user or scene [3, 4].
In this paper, we define the individuality as the elements which allows us todistinguish unique person from other person. Individuality is closely related to personality, and previous work has modeled personality using measures such as the
Big Five Traits [5]. Previous work has also noted that coherence of acoustic andlinguistic traits has a strong influence on perceptions of individuality [6].
Handling of individuality of features of the voice (i.e. “acoustic individuality”)
is a widely researched topic in speech synthesis and translation [7, 8, 9]. On theother hand, there are few studies that attempt to control the individuality of eachspeaker as expressed on the lexical level through choice of words or expressions,etc. (i.e. “linguistic individuality”). There are some works that attempt to generate
sentences that express a certain personality based on rule-based sentence generation[4], personality infused n-gram models [3]. However, while controlling personality
is certainly a first step in the direction of creating a richer user experience, researchin the area overall is sparse, and controlling personality will not allow us to, forexample, reproduce the unique expressions of a single speaker.
In this paper, we propose a technique that takes text as input, and converts the
text into text that reflects the individuality of a target speaker. This approach has
two differences from the previously mentioned work on personality-sensitive natural language generation. The first is that our method handles not generation, buttransformation, taking as input a natural language sentence and converting the individuality of the source speaker into that of the target speaker. This has the advantagethat it can be used as a post-processing step either for dialogue systems where generation is used as a black box, or for other applications that do not explicitly use
generation, such as machine translation. In addition, by focusing not on personality,
but individuality, we are able to cover applications such as the previously-mentioned
dialogue system mimicking a famous character.
We propose the probabilistic framework for transforming individuality like statistical machine translation. This framework is based on previous work [10, 11, 12]that uses machine translation techniques to translate betweens speaking or writing
styles. However, in contrast to these works, which rely on parallel data of the source
and target styles, it is difficult to prepare a large quantity of parallel data between
source and target speakers for individuality translation.
In this framework, we define a translation model (TM) that has the ability totranslate between individualities of speakers, and a language model (LM) that has
reflects the individuality of the target speaker. For the LM, we use a small collectionof text created by the target speaker and a larger background model. For the TM, as
it is difficult to create the parallel data necessary to train standard MT systems, we
examine techniques from the paraphrasing literature, acquiring paraphrases using athesaurus, distributional similarity, and bilingual parallel text.
Based on the results of the analysis, we find that in the system proposed in thispaper, conversion of function words allows for detectable and identifiable increases
in the individuality of the target sentence. On the other hand, conversion of content
words is less successful, leaving important challenges for future work.

Linguistic Individuality Transformation for Spoken Language

3

2 A Probabilistic Framework for Transforming Individuality
In this section, we describe our proposed method for translation of speaker individuality. To create a method capable of this conversion, we build upon previous workthat has studied conversion of writing or speaking style [10, 11, 12].
Specifically, we build upon the work of Neubig et al. [12], which was originallyconceived for translation from spoken to written text, or for translation of text fromone style to another. Given a string of input words V (representing a spoken language
sentence) and a string of words W (representing a written language sentence), we
transform V to W using the noisy channel model. In consideration of the quantity ofavailable corpora, the posterior probability P(W |V ) is decomposed into TM probability P(V |W ), which must be estimated from a corpus of parallel sentences, which
is more difficult to find, and LM probability P(W ), which can be estimated from a
corpus of only output side text which we can secure in large quantities:
P(W |V ) =P(V |W )P(W )
.
P(V )

(1)

Given this probabilistic model, the output is found by searching for the output sentence Ŵ that maximizes P(W |V ). P(V ) is not affected by choice of W , so this maximization is expressed as follows:Ŵ = argmax P(V |W )P(W ).

(2)

W

In addition, because the LM probability P(W ) tends to prefer shorter sentences,
we also follow standard practice in machine translation [13] in introducing a word
penalty proportional to sentence length |W |. We combine these three elements in a
log-linear model, with parameters λtm , λlm , and λwp as follows:Ŵ = argmax λtm log P(V |W ) + λlm log P(W ) + λwp |W |(3)

W

Following this framework, we consider a setting in which we translate from utterance V that expresses the individuality of the source speaker to utterance W that
expresses the individuality of target speaker. However, compared to the previously
mentioned style transformation or standard SMT, we are faced with a drastic lackof data. The amount of target side data W is limited, and we will often have noparallel data with identical semantic content expressed with the individuality of thetarget and source speakers. In fact, when we had one author of the paper attempt tomake this data in preliminary experiments, we found that even when an annotator isavailable, creation of the data is quite difficult and time-consuming. If the annotatorattempted to follow the semantic content of the input faithfully, it was difficult to express a rich variety of individuality, and when the annotator attempted to edit more
freely, the individuality was expressed abundantly, but in many cases the semantic
content changed too much to be used reliably training or testing data for the system.
In the next two sections, we describe how we build a system even in situations
where no parallel data is available to train that TM probability P(V |W ).

4Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Length

3 Language Model
For transforming individuality, it is necessary to build an LM that express the individuality of the target speaker.

3.1 Language Model Training
For transforming individuality, it is necessary to build an LM that expresses theindividuality of the target speaker. In order to do so, we need to collect data that
expresses the target speaker’s speaking style. In addition, it is better if the data used
to train the LM matches the content of the data to be converted. Thus, an initialattempt to create an LM that expresses the speaking style of the target will start withgathering data from the speaker, and training an n-gram LM on this data.

3.2 Language Model Adaptation
When we collect the utterance of only one target speaker and build an LM, it isdifficult to collect a large number of utterances from any one speaker. Thus thecontents covered by the LM are restricted. Therefore, an LM made with only datafrom the target speaker cannot estimate the LM probability P(W ) accurately. To
remedy this problem, in this paper we build a target LM that interpolates a small
LM Pt (W ) that is trained as explained in the previous section and an LM Pg (W )that is trained from a large-scale corpus. Using an interpolation coefficient λ , we
combine these two models using linear interpolation
P(W ) = λ Pt (W ) + (1 − λ )Pg (W ).

(4)

We calculate λ to generate LM P(W ), such that we achieve the maximum LM
probability on a held out development set also created using data from the target
speaker. Note that this framework is flexible, so we could also add an additional LM
considering the personality of the speaker [3], but in this paper for simplicity weonly use two models: the general domain, and with the target speaker’s individuality.

4 Translation Model
Now that we have modeled individuality in the LM, we must next create a translation
model P(V |W ) that expresses the possible transformations changing the style, but
not the semantic content, of the utterance. However, as mentioned in Section 2, it is
non-trivial to collect a corpus of sentences spoken by the source and target speaker
while having the same meaning, so we will have to create this model without relying
on a parallel corpus.
In this paper, we solve this problem by building the TM using techniques fromparaphrasing. In this work, we focus on methods for paraphrasing using a thesaurus,
n-gram-based distributional similarity, and bilingual parallel text, with each of thethree resources playing a different role.

4.1 Translation Model Using Thesauri
Thesauri are language resources specifying groups of synonyms and thus are agood resource for reliably finding semantically plausible transformations. The mostLinguistic Individuality Transformation for Spoken Language

5

widely used thesaurus in the NLP community is Wordnet [14], and its counterpart
in Japanese, our target language, is Japanese Wordnet [15]. The TM built using a
T HESAURUS is used to find replacement candidates based on synonyms for nouns
and verbs, similarly to previous works on paraphrasing using thesauri [16].
Using this thesaurus, we build the TM according to the following procedure.
1. For each word in the input, search the WordNet with the word as the query.
2. When the word is found, acquire all synonyms from WordNet using the synset.
3. Calculate the TM probability (Section 4.3) for all words, and store them in theTM.
We show an example of the TM acquired by this method in Table 1.

4.2 Translation Model Using Distributional Similarity
Thesauri have the advantage of providing broad coverage, but they also consist
mainly of synonyms for nouns and verbs, and don’t have data regarding synonymy
of fillers, exclamations, particles and other function words. However, these elements
are very important in expressing a number of aspects of language [17]. Especially inJapanese, particles at the end of the sentence and auxiliary verb particle have been
noted as playing an important role in expressing individuality [18].
The TM is built according to the following procedure.
1. Prepare a list of function words by performing POS tagging on the training corpus and extracting all non-content words.
2. Count all 3-grams in the target speaker’s utterances.
3. Find groups of n-grams that have a function word in the second position and thesame first and third words, and add them to the set of potential synonyms.
e.g.) that’s so great, that’s really great
4. Calculate the TM probability for all words, and store them in the TM.
We show an example of a TM acquired by this method in Table 2. We can extract
non-content word and particle paraphrases. In this method, we don’t consider meaning of words, and we sometime get wrong paraphrases of the meaning, for example,“it for you” and “it from you”. We check this problem by evaluating transforming
word error rate.

4.3 Calculation of Translation Model Probability
While the two previous methods can find potential candidates for translation, it gives
us no mechanism to determine how reliable these candidates are. However, we also
found in preliminary experiments that simply assigning a uniform probability to alltransformations in the previous sections was not sufficient to accurately decide whenwords are interchangeable. To solve this problem, we calculate TM probabilities
using n-gram similarity.
We base our method on techniques to acquire synonyms from non-parallel corpora [19, 20]. In the previous works, similarity of the word itself is calculated froma non-parallel corpus according to the contextual similarity of the words.

6

Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Length

Table 1 A sample of the TM using thesauri.
SourceTargetTM prob.

カメラ

カメラ (camera)

0.95(camera) キャメラ (kamera)

0.01

ビデオカメラ

0.01

Table 2 A sample of the TM using n-grams.
SourceTargetTM prob.

です (is)です (is)0.7

だ (is: informal)

0.3

けど (but)

0.8

よ (yes)0.2

も (also)

0.6

で (at)

0.4

が (SUBJ)

0.6

は (SUBJ)

0.4(video camera)
写真機

0.01

けど (but)(photo machine)
も (also)and other 2 words
良い良い (good)

0.4(good)いい (nice)

0.4

よろしい (fine)0.01

見事 (excellent)

0.01

が (SUBJ)

and other 42 words

In order to calculate this contextual similarity, we prepare a bigram LM withvocabulary L, and decide the similarity Sim(w, v) for two words w and v as follows:
Sim(w, v) = 1 −)1 (P(w|l) − P(v|l) + ∑ P(l|w) − P(l|v) .
∑2|L| l∈L
l∈L(5)

Similarity Sim(w, v) is decided by the similarity of n-gram distributions, basedon the distributional hypothesis that words that appear in similar contexts have asimilar role. For the calculated similarity Sim(w, v), we normalize over values ofSim(w, v) for all words, so that the probabilities sum to one
P(w|v) =Sim(w, v).
∑L∈l Sim(l, v)(6)

Thus, we can approximate TM probability of words w and v without using aparallel corpus.

4.4 Translation model Using Bilingual Text
The final method we examine for creating the TM is based on [21]’s method for using bilingual text to train a paraphrasing model. Paraphrases acquired by this method
have the advantage of providing broad coverage (theoretically it is possible to coverboth content and function words), and allowing for the acquiring of multi-wordtransformations.
Assume we have two phrases v and w in the language under consideration (inour case, Japanese), and also have a phrase-based TM indicating the translation
probabilities to and from a phrase e in a different language (in our case, English).

Linguistic Individuality Transformation for Spoken Language
Table 3 The details of the phrase table.
CorpusB ILINGUAL corpus including

7

Table 4 A sample of paraphrase acquired frombilingual data for “翻訳 さ れ た (translated)”.

Wikipedia, lecture, newspaper,

Translation

TM probmagazine and dialogue

翻訳 さ れ た (translated)

0.083

24.2M (en)に 翻訳 さ れ た (translated to)

0.034

29.6M (ja)翻訳 (translate)

0.012

Phrases

67.1M

共訳 (joint translation)

0.011

Max length

7 words

訳 さ れ る (was translated)

0.011

Alignment

Nile [23]と 訳 さ れ た (was translated to)

0.002

Kytea [24]and 20 other phrases

Words

Parsing

We decide the paraphrase probability P(w|v) using translation probabilities P(w|e)
and P(e|v) by using the English phrase e as a pivot as follows:P(w|v) = ∑ P(w|e)P(e|v).

(7)e

The TM probabilities can be computed using standard methods from SMT [22].
The details of the phrase table that we used in the construction of paraphrases forthis work is shown in Table 3.1
We show an example of a TM acquired by this method in Table 4.

5 Evaluation Measures for Individuality Transformation
In previous work, they evaluate the relationship between some automatic evaluation
metrics and various human judgments. Automatic metrics based on LMs have better correlation with human judgments than existing metrics in the context of previous work. We evaluate our proposed method under the same conditions as previous
work’s automatic evaluation metrics as LM.
In manual evaluation, they evaluate based on human judgments of semantic adequacy, lexical dissimilarity and stylistic similarity, because they clarify style andthe relations with individual elements. We consider it, propose several evaluation
measures for transforming of individuality that focus on individuality of the target
speaker, accuracy of conversion, and breadth of possible conversion.

5.1 Automatic Evaluation
In automatic evaluation, we use the two following measures.
LM Ratio Xu et al, [10] proposed a method for evaluating the style of a converted sentence using the ratio of language model probabilities, where Pt is theprobability of a model trained on target domain data, and Ps is the probability of
1 This Japanese paraphrase model will be made available upon acceptance of the paper.

8Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Lengtha source domain language model:P(style = target|sentence) =Pt (sentence).
Ps (sentence) + Pt (sentence)(8)

Coverage We define coverage as the ratio of words for which there is a conversion
candidate in the TM. A TM that can convert various vocabulary will have a higher
coverage, and thus coverage can be used to evaluate the breadth of the conversion.

5.2 Manual Evaluation
While automatic evaluation is useful for the rapid development of systems, it is difficult to evaluate small differences in nuance. Thus, we also perform manual evaluation to evaluate correctness and individuality of the output. Specifically, we evaluate
two following factors.
Individuality In order to evaluate individuality, we first have a subject read thetraining data to learn the individuality of target speaker. The subject is then shown
the system output and asked “does this sentence reflect the individuality of person
who wrote the training data?” The subject then assigns a score of 1 (do not agree)
to 5 (do agree).
Word Error Rate; WER This is the ratio of words converted by our method thatare syntactically or semantically incorrect in the post-conversion sentence. This iscalculated by having the subject look at the sentence before and after conversion
and point out conversion mistakes.

6 Experimental Evaluation
In order to evaluate the proposed method, we performed an evaluation focused on
how well the proposed model can reproduce the individuality of a particular speaker.

6.1 Experiment Conditions
As data for our research, we use a camera sales dialogue corpus [25] that consistsof one-on-one sales dialogues between three salesclerks and 19 customers. We split
the corpus of three salesclerks into one corpus for every speaker each and further
divide each of these corpora into training, development, and evaluation data. The
details of the data for each of the salespeople is shown in Table 5. All conversations were performed in Japanese by native or highly fluent Japanese speakers. As
mentioned in Section 3.2, in order to create an LM that is both sufficiently accurate
and expresses the personality of the speaker, we use multiple LMs created using
data from the target speaker and a larger background corpus. As our target speaker
data, we use the training data from the previously described camera sales corpus.
As our large background corpus, we use data from the BTEC [26], and the REIJIRO2 dictionary example sentence corpus. The size of these background corpora isalso shown in Table 6. We calculate the linear interpolation parameter to maximize
2 http://eijiro.jp

Linguistic Individuality Transformation for Spoken Language

9

Table 5 Number of utterances and words inthe camera sales dialogue corpus.
Clerk Utt. Word
Train

Dev.

Test

A
B
C

238 11,758
240 12,495
228 9,039

ABC

65 3,016
43 2,271
37 1,462

A
B
C

9
9
9

Table 6 Number of sentences and words in
BTEC, and REIJIRO.
Corpus Sent. Word
BTEC

465k 4.11M

REIJIRO 424k 8.90M
SUM

889k 13.01M

173
134
148

likelihood on the development data. As a result, the linear interpolation parameter λbecame 0.88. For the log-linear model in Equation (3), we set λtm = λlm = 1, and adjust the word penalty so that the length of sentences before and after transformation
is approximately equal.3
We perform an evaluation over 3 combinations of TMs for conversion of individuality. We compare the three methods for constructing the TM using the thesaurus(T HESAURUS), n-gram similarity (S IMILARITY), and parallel corpus (B ILINGUAL).
We also compare with a baseline method that does not perform any conversion atall (S OURCE).
In the experimental evaluation, we first have subjects read the training data of thetarget speaker. Next, we prepare an input sentence that is selected randomly fromother salesclerks. Based on this input sentence, we use the three methods describedin the previous paragraph to convert it into the target speaker’s individuality. The
subject reads these three results. The subject estimates WER and individuality foreach of these four conversion results according to the measures described in Section
5.2, and we also automatically calculate LM measure and coverage according to themeasures described in Section 5.1.
In this evaluation, three subjects evaluate result for 3 speakers, each with 9 utterances, 27 conversion results in total. We find the confidence interval of each evaluation measure using bootstrap resampling [27] with significance level p < 0.05.

6.2 Experiment Result
In this section, we describe the results of our evaluation of the proposed method
for transforming individuality of text. We first discuss the results for the automatic
evaluation measures. In Figure 1 we show the coverage, in Figure 2 we show the
LM ratio.
In this evaluation, when we used B ILINGUAL, coverage improved most, with a
total of 80% of words being possible candidates for replacement. However, when
Verbosity is one component of individuality, so setting λwp to a different value for eachsource/target speaker pair is more appropriate, but we leave this to future work.

3

Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Length
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we used B ILINGUAL, the percentage of words changed was 7.6%, lower than thatof S IMILARITY, with a total of 13.0%. This is because function words (acquiredby S IMILARITY) are more easily replaceable than content words or mixed phrases
containing both function and content words. In addition, when we used the S IMI LARITY TM, LM ratio improved most, with a total of 35% from 10% in S OURCE .
We show the results of manual evaluation of WER in Figure 3, and individuality
in Figure 4. The first result to be noted is that transformation using S IMILARITY isable to raise the individuality to 3.9 from the S OURCE of 2.8, a significant difference.
If we compare it with Figure 4, LM ratio and individuality understand a similar
thing evaluating. This demonstrates that our proposed method of transforming theindividuality of speakers is able to successfully do so to a noticeable degree.
However, the results given the other two methods were mixed. For T HESAURUS,
we can see the individuality actually unchanged. This is due to the fact that the
WER of this method was high, and often the meaning of the sentence was lost due
to mistaken conversions of content words. This unnaturalness resulted in very low
evaluations of individuality.
When we used B ILINGUAL, coverage and WER generally improved, and change
rate improved over T HESAURUS (which was 4.3%). However, LM ratio and individuality didn’t improve over the S OURCE. The reason for this is that function words
are very important for expressing individuality [17, 18], but were not well enoughrepresented in the paraphrases acquired from bilingual data. The reason for this is
twofold. First, data that is translated between languages usually contains few fillers

Linguistic Individuality Transformation for Spoken Language11(as they are deleted before translation), and other common spoken expressions. Second, in our case we used English and Japanese for the pivot languages, but theselanguages diverge in their use of function words (for example, English does not use
explicit case markers, and Japanese does not use articles), making acquiring goodtransformations for these words difficult. This is illustrated by the fact that B ILIN GUAL only covers a total of 11% of the transformations covered by S IMILARITY .

7 Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed a method for transforming individuality. We performed
an evaluation of the effectiveness of TMs acquired using n-gram similarity, thesauri,and bilingual text in this context. We found that function word transformations basedon n-gram similarity were the most effective in improving the individuality of text.
While the experimental results showed that the proposed technique is able tosuccessfully convert speaker individuality to some extent, there are still a numberof future challenges related to refining the language and TMs to convert speakerindividuality more precisely. The main area for improvement lies in improvementsof the TM, particularly the handling of function words in paraphrasing models acquired from bilingual text. We also plan on construct LMs that can evaluate speakerindividuality in consideration of conversation context, and experimenting on larger
data from the web.

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