Inducing Positive Perspectives with Text Reframing

Sentiment transfer is one popular example of a text style transfer task, where the goal is to reverse the sentiment polarity of a text. With a sentiment reversal comes also a reversal in meaning. We introduce a different but related task called positive reframing in which we neutralize a negative point of view and generate a more positive perspective for the author without contradicting the original meaning. Our insistence on meaning preservation makes positive reframing a challenging and semantically rich task. To facilitate rapid progress, we introduce a large-scale benchmark, POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY FRAMES, with 8,349 sentence pairs and 12,755 structured annotations to explain positive reframing in terms of six theoretically-motivated reframing strategies.

We effectively reframe negative text by inducing a complementary positive viewpoint (e.g. glass-half-full), which nevertheless supports the underlying content of the original sentence.