From Theories on Styles to their Transfer in Text: Bridging the Gap with a Hierarchical Survey

Understand

Humans are naturally endowed with the ability to write in a particular style.

• They can, for instance, re-phrase a formal letter in an informal way, convey a literal message with the use of figures of speech or edit a novel by mimicking the style of some well-known authors.
• Automating this form of creativity constitutes the goal of style transfer.
• As a natural language generation task, style transfer aims at rewriting existing texts, and specifically, it creates paraphrases that exhibit some desired stylistic attributes.