Papers › Prompt-Based Editing for Text Style Transfer

Prompt-Based Editing for Text Style Transfer

27 Jan 2023arXiv:2301.11997archive 2025-07-28

Guoqing Luo, Yu Tong Han, Lili Mou, Mauajama Firdaus

Prompting approaches have been recently explored in text style transfer, where a textual prompt is used to query a pretrained language model to generate style-transferred texts word by word in an autoregressive manner. However, such a generation process is less controllable and early prediction errors may affect future word predictions. In this paper, we present a prompt-based editing approach for text style transfer. Specifically, we prompt a pretrained language model for style classification and use the classification probability to compute a style score. Then, we perform discrete search with word-level editing to maximize a comprehensive scoring function for the style-transfer task. In this way, we transform a prompt-based generation problem into a classification one, which is a training-free process and more controllable than the autoregressive generation of sentences. In our experiments, we performed both automatic and human evaluation on three style-transfer benchmark datasets, and show that our approach largely outperforms the state-of-the-art systems that have 20 times more parameters. Additional empirical analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.

Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

manga-uofa/prompt-edit officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ClassificationLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingStyle TransferText Style Transfer

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections