XFORMAL: A Benchmark for Multilingual Formality Style Transfer
This addresses the need for multilingual style transfer benchmarks, but it is incremental as it extends existing work to new languages.
The authors tackled the problem of multilingual formality style transfer by creating XFORMAL, a benchmark for Brazilian Portuguese, French, and Italian, and found that state-of-the-art methods perform similarly to simple baselines, indicating increased difficulty in multilingual settings.
We take the first step towards multilingual style transfer by creating and releasing XFORMAL, a benchmark of multiple formal reformulations of informal text in Brazilian Portuguese, French, and Italian. Results on XFORMAL suggest that state-of-the-art style transfer approaches perform close to simple baselines, indicating that style transfer is even more challenging when moving multilingual.