Controlling Styles in Neural Machine Translation with Activation Prompt

Neural machine translation(NMT) has aroused wide attention due to its impressive quality. Beyond quality, controlling translation styles is also an important demand for many languages. Previous related studies mainly focus on controlling formality and gain some improvements. However, they still face two challenges. The first is the evaluation limitation. Style contains abundant information including lexis, syntax, etc. But only formality is well studied. The second is the heavy reliance on iterative fine-tuning when new styles are required. Correspondingly, this paper contributes in terms of the benchmark and approach. First, we re-visit this task and propose a multiway stylized machine translation (MSMT) benchmark, which includes multiple categories of styles in four language directions to push the boundary of this task. Second, we propose a method named style activation prompt (StyleAP) by retrieving prompts from stylized monolingual corpus, which needs no extra fine-tuning. Experiments show that StyleAP could effectively control the style of translation and achieve remarkable performance. All of our data and code are released at https://github.com/IvanWang0730/StyleAP.