@inproceedings{gokulakrishnan-etal-2025-gatsby,
    title = "Gatsby without the `{E}': Creating Lipograms with {LLM}s",
    author = "Gokulakrishnan, Nitish  and
      Balasubramanian, Rohan  and
      Saba, Syeda Jannatus  and
      Skiena, Steven",
    editor = "Inui, Kentaro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Wang, Haofen  and
      Wong, Derek F.  and
      Bhattacharyya, Pushpak  and
      Banerjee, Biplab  and
      Ekbal, Asif  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Singh, Dhirendra Pratap",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.18/",
    pages = "189--199",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-299-2",
    abstract = "Lipograms are a unique form of constrained writing where all occurrences of a particular letter are excluded from the text, typified by the novel Gadsby (Wright, 1939), which daringly avoids all usage of the letter `e'. In this study, we explore the power of modern large language models (LLMs) by transforming the novel The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925) into a fully `e'-less text. We experimented with a range of techniques, from baseline methods like synonym replacement to sophisticated generative models enhanced with beam search and named entity analysis. We show that excluding up to 3.6{\%} of the most common letters (up to the letter `u') had minimal impact on the text{'}s meaning, although translation fidelity rapidly and predictably decays with stronger lipogram constraints. Our work highlights the surprising flexibility of English under strict constraints."
}