Change My Frame: Reframing in the Wild in r/ChangeMyView
This work addresses the challenge of realistic reframing in online discourse for natural language processing applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing text style transfer methods with a new dataset.
The paper tackles the problem of generalizing text reframing beyond neutral or positive directions by leveraging community interactions from the r/ChangeMyView subreddit to build a dataset and fine-tune transformer-based models, resulting in a widened scope of perspective changes.
Recent work in reframing, within the scope of text style transfer, has so far made use of out-of-context, task-prompted utterances in order to produce neutralizing or optimistic reframes. Our work aims to generalize reframing based on the subreddit r/ChangeMyView (CMV). We build a dataset that leverages CMV's community's interactions and conventions to identify high-value, community-recognized utterances that produce changes of perspective. With this data, we widen the scope of the direction of reframing since the changes in perspective do not only occur in neutral or positive directions. We fine tune transformer-based models, make use of a modern LLM to refine our dataset, and explore challenges in the dataset creation and evaluation around this type of reframing.