{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/lewis-levenshtein-editing-for-unsupervised","title":"LEWIS: Levenshtein Editing for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer","arxiv_id":"2105.08206","date":"2021-05-18","proceeding":"Findings (ACL) 2021 8","authors":["Machel Reid","Victor Zhong"],"abstract":"Many types of text style transfer can be achieved with only small, precise edits (e.g. sentiment transfer from I had a terrible time... to I had a great time...). We propose a coarse-to-fine editor for style transfer that transforms text using Levenshtein edit operations (e.g. insert, replace, delete). Unlike prior single-span edit methods, our method concurrently edits multiple spans in the source text. To train without parallel style text pairs (e.g. pairs of +/- sentiment statements), we propose an unsupervised data synthesis procedure. We first convert text to style-agnostic templates using style classifier attention (e.g. I had a SLOT time...), then fill in slots in these templates using fine-tuned pretrained language models. Our method outperforms existing generation and editing style transfer methods on sentiment (Yelp, Amazon) and politeness (Polite) transfer. In particular, multi-span editing achieves higher performance and more diverse output than single-span editing. Moreover, compared to previous methods on unsupervised data synthesis, our method results in higher quality parallel style pairs and improves model performance.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08206v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.08206v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"lewis-levenshtein-editing-for-unsupervised","repo_url":"https://github.com/machelreid/lewis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"style-transfer","task_name":"Style Transfer"},{"task_slug":"text-style-transfoer","task_name":"Text Style Transfer"},{"task_slug":"unsupervised-text-style-transfer","task_name":"Unsupervised Text Style Transfer"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2105.08206","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2105.08206"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq","reach":null},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/machelreid/lewis","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"found_in_text":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"9d7e8a3a1450df73","entry":"IterativeRefinementGenerator","repo":"pytorch/fairseq","repo_kind":"found_in_text","path":"fairseq/iterative_refinement_generator.py","file_url":"https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/blob/HEAD/fairseq/iterative_refinement_generator.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"9d7e8a3a1450df73"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}