No Arabic abstract
Poetry generation has been a difficult task in natural language processing. Unlike plain neural text generation tasks, poetry has a high requirement for novelty, since an easily-understood sentence with too many high frequency words might not be considered as poetic, while adequately ambiguous sentences with low frequency words can possibly be novel and creative. Inspired by this, we present Lingxi, a diversity-aware Chinese modern poetry generation system. We propose nucleus sampling with randomized head (NS-RH) algorithm, which randomizes the high frequency part (head) of the predicted distribution, in order to emphasize on the comparatively low frequency words. The proposed algorithm can significantly increase the novelty of generated poetry compared with traditional sampling methods. The permutation of distribution is controllable by tuning the filtering parameter that determines the head to permutate, achieving diversity-aware sampling. We find that even when a large portion of filtered vocabulary is randomized, it can actually generate fluent poetry but with notably higher novelty. We also propose a semantic-similarity-based rejection sampling algorithm, which creates longer and more informative context on the basis of the short input poetry title while maintaining high semantic similarity to the title, alleviating the off-topic issue.
Recent studies in sequence-to-sequence learning demonstrate that RNN encoder-decoder structure can successfully generate Chinese poetry. However, existing methods can only generate poetry with a given first line or users intent theme. In this paper, we proposed a three-stage multi-modal Chinese poetry generation approach. Given a picture, the first line, the title and the other lines of the poem are successively generated in three stages. According to the characteristics of Chinese poems, we propose a hierarchy-attention seq2seq model which can effectively capture character, phrase, and sentence information between contexts and improve the symmetry delivered in poems. In addition, the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model is utilized for title generation and improve the relevance of the whole poem and the title. Compared with strong baseline, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, using machine evaluations as well as human judgments.
Chinese poetry is an important part of worldwide culture, and classical and modern sub-branches are quite different. The former is a unique genre and has strict constraints, while the latter is very flexible in length, optional to have rhymes, and similar to modern poetry in other languages. Thus, it requires more to control the coherence and improve the novelty. In this paper, we propose a generate-retrieve-then-refine paradigm to jointly improve the coherence and novelty. In the first stage, a draft is generated given keywords (i.e., topics) only. The second stage produces a refining vector from retrieval lines. At last, we take into consideration both the draft and the refining vector to generate a new poem. The draft provides future sentence-level information for a line to be generated. Meanwhile, the refining vector points out the direction of refinement based on impressive words detection mechanism which can learn good patterns from references and then create new ones via insertion operation. Experimental results on a collected large-scale modern Chinese poetry dataset show that our proposed approach can not only generate more coherent poems, but also improve the diversity and novelty.
Poetry is one of the most important art forms of human languages. Recently many studies have focused on incorporating some linguistic features of poetry, such as style and sentiment, into its understanding or generation system. However, there is no focus on understanding or evaluating the semantics of poetry. Therefore, we propose a novel task to assess a models semantic understanding of poetry by poem matching. Specifically, this task requires the model to select one line of Chinese classical poetry among four candidates according to the modern Chinese translation of a line of poetry. To construct this dataset, we first obtain a set of parallel data of Chinese classical poetry and modern Chinese translation. Then we retrieve similar lines of poetry with the lines in a poetry corpus as negative choices. We name the dataset Chinese Classical Poetry Matching Dataset (CCPM) and release it at https://github.com/THUNLP-AIPoet/CCPM. We hope this dataset can further enhance the study on incorporating deep semantics into the understanding and generation system of Chinese classical poetry. We also preliminarily run two variants of BERT on this dataset as the baselines for this dataset.
Given the advantage and recent success of English character-level and subword-unit models in several NLP tasks, we consider the equivalent modeling problem for Chinese. Chinese script is logographic and many Chinese logograms are composed of common substructures that provide semantic, phonetic and syntactic hints. In this work, we propose to explicitly incorporate the visual appearance of a characters glyph in its representation, resulting in a novel glyph-aware embedding of Chinese characters. Being inspired by the success of convolutional neural networks in computer vision, we use them to incorporate the spatio-structural patterns of Chinese glyphs as rendered in raw pixels. In the context of two basic Chinese NLP tasks of language modeling and word segmentation, the model learns to represent each characters task-relevant semantic and syntactic information in the character-level embedding.
In this paper, we aim to address the challenges surrounding the translation of ancient Chinese text: (1) The linguistic gap due to the difference in eras results in translations that are poor in quality, and (2) most translations are missing the contextual information that is often very crucial to understanding the text. To this end, we improve upon past translation techniques by proposing the following: We reframe the task as a multi-label prediction task where the model predicts both the translation and its particular era. We observe that this helps to bridge the linguistic gap as chronological context is also used as auxiliary information. % As a natural step of generalization, we pivot on the modern Chinese translations to generate multilingual outputs. %We show experimentally the efficacy of our framework in producing quality translation outputs and also validate our framework on a collected task-specific parallel corpus. We validate our framework on a parallel corpus annotated with chronology information and show experimentally its efficacy in producing quality translation outputs. We release both the code and the data https://github.com/orina1123/time-aware-ancient-text-translation for future research.