SentiInc: Incorporating sentiment information into sentiment transfer without parallel data

Abstract

Sentiment-to-sentiment transfer involves changing the sentiment of the given text while preserving the underlying information. In this work, we present a model SentiInc for sentiment-to-sentiment transfer using unpaired mono-sentiment data. Existing sentiment-to-sentiment transfer models ignore the valuable sentiment-specific details already present in the text. We address this issue by providing a simple framework for encoding sentiment-specific information in the target sentence while preserving the content information. This is done by incorporating sentiment based loss in the back-translation based style transfer. Extensive experiments over the Yelp dataset show that the SentiInc outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a margin of as large as ~11% in G-score. The results also demonstrate that our model produces sentiment-accurate and information-preserved sentences.