SongRewriter: A Chinese Song Rewriting System with Controllable Content and Rhyme Scheme

Yusen Sun, Liangyou Li, Qun Liu, Dit-Yan Yeung

Abstract
Although lyrics generation has achieved significant progress in recent years, it has limited practical applications because the generated lyrics cannot be performed without composing compatible melodies. In this work, we bridge this practical gap by proposing a song rewriting system which rewrites the lyrics of an existing song such that the generated lyrics are compatible with the rhythm of the existing melody and thus singable. In particular, we propose SongRewriter, a controllable Chinese lyric generation and editing system which assists users without prior knowledge of melody composition. The system is trained by a randomized multi-level masking strategy which produces a unified model for generating entirely new lyrics or editing a few fragments. To improve the controllabiliy of the generation process, we further incorporate a keyword prompt to control the lexical choices of the content and propose novel decoding constraints and a vowel modeling task to enable flexible end and internal rhyme schemes. While prior rhyming metrics are mainly for rap lyrics, we propose three novel rhyming evaluation metrics for song lyrics. Both automatic and human evaluations show that the proposed model performs better than the state-of-the-art models in both contents and rhyming quality.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.814
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12863–12880
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.814
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.814
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yusen Sun, Liangyou Li, Qun Liu, and Dit-Yan Yeung. 2023. SongRewriter: A Chinese Song Rewriting System with Controllable Content and Rhyme Scheme. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 12863–12880, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SongRewriter: A Chinese Song Rewriting System with Controllable Content and Rhyme Scheme (Sun et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.findings-acl.814.pdf
PDF Search