Poetry in Pixels: Prompt Tuning for Poem Image Generation via Diffusion Models

Sofia Jamil, Bollampalli Areen Reddy, Raghvendra Kumar, Sriparna Saha, Joseph K. J, Koustava Goswami


Abstract
The task of text-to-image generation has encountered significant challenges when applied to literary works, especially poetry. Poems are a distinct form of literature, with meanings that frequently transcend beyond the literal words. To address this shortcoming, we propose a PoemToPixel framework designed to generate images that visually represent the inherent meanings of poems. Our approach incorporates the concept of prompt tuning in our image generation framework to ensure that the resulting images closely align with the poetic content. In addition, we propose the PoeKey algorithm, which extracts three key elements in the form of emotions, visual elements, and themes from poems to form instructions which are subsequently provided to a diffusion model for generating corresponding images. Furthermore, to expand the diversity of the poetry dataset across different genres and ages, we introduce MiniPo, a novel multimodal dataset comprising 1001 children’s poems and images. Leveraging this dataset alongside PoemSum, we conducted both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of image generation using our PoemToPixel framework. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach and offers a fresh perspective on generating images from literary sources. The code and dataset used in this work are publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.620
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9224–9237
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.620/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sofia Jamil, Bollampalli Areen Reddy, Raghvendra Kumar, Sriparna Saha, Joseph K. J, and Koustava Goswami. 2025. Poetry in Pixels: Prompt Tuning for Poem Image Generation via Diffusion Models. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 9224–9237, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Poetry in Pixels: Prompt Tuning for Poem Image Generation via Diffusion Models (Jamil et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.620.pdf