ARIA: Audio-Driven Melody–Tone Relation Modeling for Cantonese Lyric Authoring

Shengyu Li, Jinting Wang, Li Liu


Abstract
Cantonese lyric writing requires close alignment between lexical tones and melodic pitch. Existing melody-guided lyric generation methods typically rely on symbolic melody to generate lyrics. However, in real songwriting scenarios, melodies are often expressed as raw singing audio or hummed recordings, where pitch is implicit, noisy, and unstructured, making these methods difficult to apply directly. To address this limitation, we propose ARIA, a two-stage audio-driven melody–tone relation modeling framework for Cantonese lyric authoring that generates Cantonese lyrics from singing recordings with provided character-level timestamps. Specifically, we first design a Tri-Stream Relation-Aware Tone Estimator (TRATE) to predict 0243 sequences from timestamped singing audio by modeling multi-stream acoustic cues and relational tonal structure. We then propose a Decoupled Retrieval-Augmented Tone-Conditioned Lyric Generator (DRA-TCLG) to generate fluent lyrics conditioned on predicted tonal plans with retrieval-enhanced lexical guidance. Moreover, we construct a large-scale aligned audio–Jyutping–0243 dataset from real Cantonese singing recordings to support this new task. Experimental results demonstrate that ARIA achieves strong performance in both 0243 prediction and tone-consistent lyric generation, validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.695
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14572–14595
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.695/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shengyu Li, Jinting Wang, and Li Liu. 2026. ARIA: Audio-Driven Melody–Tone Relation Modeling for Cantonese Lyric Authoring. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 14572–14595, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ARIA: Audio-Driven Melody–Tone Relation Modeling for Cantonese Lyric Authoring (Li et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.695.pdf