End-to-end style-conditioned poetry generation: What does it take to learn from examples alone?

Jörg Wöckener, Thomas Haider, Tristan Miller, The-Khang Nguyen, Thanh Tung Linh Nguyen, Minh Vu Pham, Jonas Belouadi, Steffen Eger


Abstract
In this work, we design an end-to-end model for poetry generation based on conditioned recurrent neural network (RNN) language models whose goal is to learn stylistic features (poem length, sentiment, alliteration, and rhyming) from examples alone. We show this model successfully learns the ‘meaning’ of length and sentiment, as we can control it to generate longer or shorter as well as more positive or more negative poems. However, the model does not grasp sound phenomena like alliteration and rhyming, but instead exploits low-level statistical cues. Possible reasons include the size of the training data, the relatively low frequency and difficulty of these sublexical phenomena as well as model biases. We show that more recent GPT-2 models also have problems learning sublexical phenomena such as rhyming from examples alone.
Anthology ID:
2021.latechclfl-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (online)
Editors:
Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCHCLfL
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
57–66
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.latechclfl-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.latechclfl-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jörg Wöckener, Thomas Haider, Tristan Miller, The-Khang Nguyen, Thanh Tung Linh Nguyen, Minh Vu Pham, Jonas Belouadi, and Steffen Eger. 2021. End-to-end style-conditioned poetry generation: What does it take to learn from examples alone?. In Proceedings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 57–66, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
End-to-end style-conditioned poetry generation: What does it take to learn from examples alone? (Wöckener et al., LaTeCHCLfL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.latechclfl-1.7.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.latechclfl-1.7.mp4