Disentangled Representations for Manipulation of Sentiment in Text

Abstract

The ability to change arbitrary aspects of a text while leaving the core message intact could have a strong impact in fields like marketing and politics by enabling e.g. automatic optimization of message impact and personalized language adapted to the receiver's profile. In this paper we take a first step towards such a system by presenting an algorithm that can manipulate the sentiment of a text while preserving its semantics using disentangled representations. Validation is performed by examining trajectories in embedding space and analyzing transformed sentences for semantic preservation while expression of desired sentiment shift.