Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese

Zhichao Yang, Pengshan Cai, Yansong Feng, Fei Li, Weijiang Feng, Elena Suet-Ying Chiu, Hong Yu

Abstract
Classical Chinese poetry is a jewel in the treasure house of Chinese culture. Previous poem generation models only allow users to employ keywords to interfere the meaning of generated poems, leaving the dominion of generation to the model. In this paper, we propose a novel task of generating classical Chinese poems from vernacular, which allows users to have more control over the semantic of generated poems. We adapt the approach of unsupervised machine translation (UMT) to our task. We use segmentation-based padding and reinforcement learning to address under-translation and over-translation respectively. According to experiments, our approach significantly improve the perplexity and BLEU compared with typical UMT models. Furthermore, we explored guidelines on how to write the input vernacular to generate better poems. Human evaluation showed our approach can generate high-quality poems which are comparable to amateur poems.
Anthology ID:
D19-1637
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6155–6164
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1637
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1637
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhichao Yang, Pengshan Cai, Yansong Feng, Fei Li, Weijiang Feng, Elena Suet-Ying Chiu, and Hong Yu. 2019. Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6155–6164, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese (Yang et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/D19-1637.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1637.Attachment.pdf
Code
 whaleloops/interpoetry
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