Songs Across Borders: Singable and Controllable Neural Lyric Translation

Longshen Ou, Xichu Ma, Min-Yen Kan, Ye Wang


Abstract
The development of general-domain neural machine translation (NMT) methods has advanced significantly in recent years, but the lack of naturalness and musical constraints in the outputs makes them unable to produce singable lyric translations. This paper bridges the singability quality gap by formalizing lyric translation into a constrained translation problem, converting theoretical guidance and practical techniques from translatology literature to prompt-driven NMT approaches, exploring better adaptation methods, and instantiating them to an English-Chinese lyric translation system. Our model achieves 99.85%, 99.00%, and 95.52% on length accuracy, rhyme accuracy, and word boundary recall. In our subjective evaluation, our model shows a 75% relative enhancement on overall quality, compared against naive fine-tuning (Code available at https://github.com/Sonata165/ControllableLyricTranslation).
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
447–467
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.27
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.27
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Longshen Ou, Xichu Ma, Min-Yen Kan, and Ye Wang. 2023. Songs Across Borders: Singable and Controllable Neural Lyric Translation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 447–467, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Songs Across Borders: Singable and Controllable Neural Lyric Translation (Ou et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.27.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.27.mp4