PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification Data for Learning Enhanced Generation

Sedrick Scott Keh, Kevin Lu, Varun Gangal, Steven Y. Feng, Harsh Jhamtani, Malihe Alikhani, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
A personification is a figure of speech that endows inanimate entities with properties and actions typically seen as requiring animacy. In this paper, we explore the task of personification generation. To this end, we propose PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation. We curate a corpus of personifications called PersonifCorp, together with automatically generated de-personified literalizations of these personifications. We demonstrate the usefulness of this parallel corpus by training a seq2seq model to personify a given literal input. Both automatic and human evaluations show that fine-tuning with PersonifCorp leads to significant gains in personification-related qualities such as animacy and interestingness. A detailed qualitative analysis also highlights key strengths and imperfections of PINEAPPLE over baselines, demonstrating a strong ability to generate diverse and creative personifications that enhance the overall appeal of a sentence.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.547
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6270–6284
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.547
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sedrick Scott Keh, Kevin Lu, Varun Gangal, Steven Y. Feng, Harsh Jhamtani, Malihe Alikhani, and Eduard Hovy. 2022. PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification Data for Learning Enhanced Generation. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6270–6284, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification Data for Learning Enhanced Generation (Keh et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.coling-1.547.pdf
Code
 sedrickkeh/pineapple
Data
CommonGenConceptNet