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Title: A Probabilistic Formulation of Unsupervised Text Style Transfer

Paper content:
We present a deep generative model for unsupervised text style transfer that unifies previously proposed non-generative techniques.
Our probabilistic approach models non-parallel data from two domains as a partially observed parallel corpus.
By hypothesizing a parallel latent sequence that generates each observed sequence, our model learns to transform sequences from one domain to another in a completely unsupervised fashion.
In contrast with traditional generative sequence models (e.g. the HMM), our model makes few assumptions about the data it generates: it uses a recurrent language model as a prior and an encoder-decoder as a transduction distribution.
While computation of marginal data likelihood is intractable in this model class, we show that amortized variational inference admits a practical surrogate.
Further, by drawing connections between our variational objective and other recent unsupervised style transfer and machine translation techniques, we show how our probabilistic view can unify some known non-generative objectives such as backtranslation and adversarial loss.
Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of unsupervised style transfer tasks, including sentiment transfer, formality transfer, word decipherment, author imitation, and related language translation.
Across all style transfer tasks, our approach yields substantial gains over state-of-the-art non-generative baselines, including the state-of-the-art unsupervised machine translation techniques that our approach generalizes.
Further, we conduct experiments on a standard unsupervised machine translation task and find that our unified approach matches the current state-of-the-art.
Text sequence transduction systems convert a given text sequence from one domain to another.
These techniques can be applied to a wide range of natural language processing applications such as machine translation (Bahdanau et al., 2015) , summarization (Rush et al., 2015) , and dialogue response generation (Zhao et al., 2017) .
In many cases, however, parallel corpora for the task at hand are scarce.
Therefore, unsupervised sequence transduction methods that require only non-parallel data are appealing and have been receiving growing attention (Bannard & Callison-Burch, 2005; Ravi & Knight, 2011; Mizukami et al., 2015; Shen et al., 2017; Lample et al., 2018; .
This trend is most pronounced in the space of text style transfer tasks where parallel data is particularly challenging to obtain (Hu et al., 2017; Shen et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2018) .
Style transfer has historically referred to sequence transduction problems that modify superficial properties of texti.e.
style rather than content.
We focus on a standard suite of style transfer tasks, including formality transfer (Rao & Tetreault, 2018) , author imitation (Xu et al., 2012) , word decipherment (Shen et al., 2017) , sentiment transfer (Shen et al., 2017) , and related language translation (Pourdamghani & Knight, 2017) .
General unsupervised translation has not typically been considered style transfer, but for the purpose of comparison we also conduct evaluation on this task (Lample et al., 2017) .
Recent work on unsupervised text style transfer mostly employs non-generative or non-probabilistic modeling approaches.
For example, Shen et al. (2017) and Yang et al. (2018) design adversarial discriminators to shape their unsupervised objective -an approach that can be effective, but often introduces training instability.
Other work focuses on directly designing unsupervised training objectives by incorporating intuitive loss terms (e.g. backtranslation loss), and demonstrates state-ofthe-art performance on unsupervised machine translation (Lample et al., 2018; Artetxe et al., 2019) and style transfer (Lample et al., 2019) .
However, the space of possible unsupervised objectives is extremely large and the underlying modeling assumptions defined by each objective can only be reasoned about indirectly.
As a result, the process of designing such systems is often heuristic.
In contrast, probabilistic models (e.g. the noisy channel model (Shannon, 1948) ) define assumptions about data more explicitly and allow us to reason about these assumptions during system design.
Further, the corresponding objectives are determined naturally by principles of probabilistic inference, reducing the need for empirical search directly in the space of possible objectives.
That said, classical probabilistic models for unsupervised sequence transduction (e.g. the HMM or semi-HMM) typically enforce overly strong independence assumptions about data to make exact inference tractable (Knight et al., 2006; Ravi & Knight, 2011; Pourdamghani & Knight, 2017) .
This has restricted their development and caused their performance to lag behind unsupervised neural objectives on complex tasks.
Luckily, in recent years, powerful variational approximation techniques have made it more practical to train probabilistic models without strong independence assumptions (Miao & Blunsom, 2016; Yin et al., 2018) .
Inspired by this, we take a new approach to unsupervised style transfer.
We directly define a generative probabilistic model that treats a non-parallel corpus in two domains as a partially observed parallel corpus.
Our model makes few independence assumptions and its true posterior is intractable.
However, we show that by using amortized variational inference (Kingma & Welling, 2013) , a principled probabilistic technique, a natural unsupervised objective falls out of our modeling approach that has many connections with past work, yet is different from all past work in specific ways.
In experiments across a suite of unsupervised text style transfer tasks, we find that the natural objective of our model actually outperforms all manually defined unsupervised objectives from past work, supporting the notion that probabilistic principles can be a useful guide even in deep neural systems.
Further, in the case of unsupervised machine translation, our model matches the current state-of-the-art non-generative approach.

assistant: text: We formulate a probabilistic latent sequence model to tackle unsupervised text style transfer, and show its effectiveness across a suite of unsupervised text style transfer tasks.