Sentiment-Controllable Chinese Poetry Generation

Sentiment-Controllable Chinese Poetry Generation

Huimin Chen, Xiaoyuan Yi, Maosong Sun, Wenhao Li, Cheng Yang, Zhipeng Guo

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4925-4931. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/684

Expressing diverse sentiments is one of the main purposes of human poetry creation. Existing Chinese poetry generation models have made great progress in poetry quality, but they all neglected to endow generated poems with specific sentiments. Such defect leads to strong sentiment collapse or bias and thus hurts the diversity and semantics of generated poems. Meanwhile, there are few sentimental Chinese poetry resources for studying. To address this problem, we first collect a manually-labelled sentimental poetry corpus with fine-grained sentiment labels. Then we propose a novel semi-supervised conditional Variational Auto-Encoder model for sentiment-controllable poetry generation. Besides, since poetry is discourse-level text where the polarity and intensity of sentiment could transfer among lines, we incorporate a temporal module to capture sentiment transition patterns among different lines. Experimental results show our model can control the sentiment of not only a whole poem but also each line, and improve the poetry diversity against the state-of-the-art models without losing quality.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Generation
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing