Story-level Text Style Transfer: A Proposal (2020)

Abstract: Text style transfer aims to change the style of the input text to the target style while preserving the content to some extent. Previous works on this task are on the sentence level. We aim to work on story-level text style transfer to generate stories that preserve the plot of the input story while exhibiting a strong target style. The challenge in this task compared to previous work is that the structure of the input story, consisting of named entities and their relations with each other, needs to be preserved, and that the generated story needs to be consistent after adding flavors. We plan to explore three methods including the BERT-based method, the Story Realization method, and the Graph-based method.

## related work the work we propose is closely related to previous work on event extraction from text so that we have a structure representation of the input story, and text generation from events to produce the story in the target style. ## proposed methodology our goal is to adapt the original story to the target setting. a well-known example of such kind of adaptation is new york theatre production sleep no more, which adapts the story of macbeth deprived of its original time setting, and sets in a 1930s hotel called the mckittrick. ## summary we propose to explore text style transfer on the story level. the challenge remains in preserving the main plot and generating consistent and meaningful text in the target style. we plan to focus mostly on studying the possible application of gcn in this task. we will perform extensive experiments and report results in future work.