Yongzhu Chang


2023

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Sudowoodo: A Chinese Lyric Imitation System with Source Lyrics
Yongzhu Chang | Rongsheng Zhang | Lin Jiang | Qihang Chen | Le Zhang | Jiashu Pu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Lyrics generation is a well-known application in natural language generation research, with several previous studies focusing on generating accurate lyrics using precise control such as keywords, rhymes, etc. However, lyrics imitation, which involves writing new lyrics by imitating the style and content of the source lyrics, remains a challenging task due to the lack of a parallel corpus. In this paper, we introduce Sudowoodo, a Chinese lyrics imitation system that can generate new lyrics based on the text of source lyrics. To address the issue of lacking a parallel training corpus for lyrics imitation, we propose a novel framework to construct a parallel corpus based on a keyword-based lyrics model from source lyrics. Then the pairs (new lyrics, source lyrics) are used to train the lyrics imitation model. During the inference process, we utilize a post-processing module to filter and rank the generated lyrics, selecting the highest-quality ones. We incorporated audio information and aligned the lyrics with the audio to form the songs as a bonus. The human evaluation results show that our framework can perform better lyric imitation. Meanwhile, the Sudowoodo system and demo video of the system is available at Sudowoodo and https://youtu.be/u5BBT\_j1L5M

2022

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Probing Simile Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models
Weijie Chen | Yongzhu Chang | Rongsheng Zhang | Jiashu Pu | Guandan Chen | Le Zhang | Yadong Xi | Yijiang Chen | Chang Su
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Simile interpretation (SI) and simile generation (SG) are challenging tasks for NLP because models require adequate world knowledge to produce predictions. Previous works have employed many hand-crafted resources to bring knowledge-related into models, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) based approaches have become the de-facto standard in NLP since they learn generic knowledge from a large corpus. The knowledge embedded in PLMs may be useful for SI and SG tasks. Nevertheless, there are few works to explore it. In this paper, we probe simile knowledge from PLMs to solve the SI and SG tasks in the unified framework of simile triple completion for the first time. The backbone of our framework is to construct masked sentences with manual patterns and then predict the candidate words in the masked position. In this framework, we adopt a secondary training process (Adjective-Noun mask Training) with the masked language model (MLM) loss to enhance the prediction diversity of candidate words in the masked position. Moreover, pattern ensemble (PE) and pattern search (PS) are applied to improve the quality of predicted words. Finally, automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in both SI and SG tasks.

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QiuNiu: A Chinese Lyrics Generation System with Passage-Level Input
Le Zhang | Rongsheng Zhang | Xiaoxi Mao | Yongzhu Chang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Lyrics generation has been a very popular application of natural language generation. Previous works mainly focused on generating lyrics based on a couple of attributes or keywords, rendering very limited control over the content of the lyrics. In this paper, we demonstrate the QiuNiu, a Chinese lyrics generation system which is conditioned on passage-level text rather than a few attributes or keywords. By using the passage-level text as input, the content of generated lyrics is expected to reflect the nuances of users’ needs. The QiuNiu system supports various forms of passage-level input, such as short stories, essays, poetry. The training of it is conducted under the framework of unsupervised machine translation, due to the lack of aligned passage-level text-to-lyrics corpus. We initialize the parameters of QiuNiu with a custom pretrained Chinese GPT-2 model and adopt a two-step process to finetune the model for better alignment between passage-level text and lyrics. Additionally, a postprocess module is used to filter and rerank the generated lyrics to select the ones of highest quality. The demo video of the system is available at https://youtu.be/OCQNzahqWgM.