Help me write a Poem: Instruction Tuning as a Vehicle for Collaborative Poetry Writing

Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6848 - 6863 December 7-11, 2022 ©2022 Association for Computational Linguistics Help me write a poem: Instruction Tuning as a Vehicle for Collaborative Poetry Writing Tuhin Chakrabarty1∗ Vishakh Padmakumar2∗ He He 2,3 1Department of Computer Science, Columbia University 2Center for Data Science, New York University 3Department of Computer Science, New York University tuhin.chakr@cs.columbia.edu, vishakh@nyu.edu, hhe@nyu.edu Abstract Recent work in training large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions has opened up exciting opportunities for natu- ral language interface design. Building on the prior success of LLMs in the realm of computer- assisted creativity, we aim to study if LLMs can improve the quality of user-generated content through collaboration. We present CoPoet, a collaborative poetry writing system. In contrast to auto-completing a user’s text, CoPoet is con- trolled by user instructions that specify the at- tributes of the desired text, such as Write a sen- tence about ‘love’ or Write a sentence ending in ‘fly’. The core component of our system is a lan- guage model fine-tuned on a diverse collection of instructions for poetry writing. Our model is not only competitive with publicly available LLMs trained on instructions (InstructGPT), but is also capable of satisfying unseen com- positional instructions. A study with 15 qual- ified crowdworkers shows that users success- fully write poems with CoPoet on diverse top- ics ranging from Monarchy to Climate change. Further, the collaboratively written poems are preferred by third-party evaluators over those written without the system.1 1 Introduction Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress towards generating coherent text in a wide variety of domains. This has spurred increasing interest in computer-assisted creativity (See et al., 2019; Elkins and Chun, 2020; Ramesh et al., 2022; Branwen, 2020) such as build- ing co-creative assistants for writing stories, poems, and argumentative essays (Lee et al., 2022; Swan- son et al., 2021; Uthus et al., 2019; Donahue et al., 2020; Padmakumar and He, 2022; Du et al., 2022). The adoption of these technologies hinges on their ∗Both Authors Contributed Equally 1Our code, preprocessed data, models, and the interaction logs from our user study are available at https://github. com/vishakhpk/creative-instructions Write a simile about 'cake' A cake is like a cloud of joy. A cake is like a piece of heaven. Suggest a verse to follow the sentence 'The cake is like a cloud of joy' The frosting is like a rainbow. So soft so fluffy, I could cry. The cake is like a cloud of joy. The frosting is like a rainbow. One slice is heaven on Earth, A flowing chocolate volcano. Write a poetic sentence that contains the word 'chocolate' and ends in 'volcano' A flowing chocolate volcano. I ate so much chocolate and erupted like a volcano. The cake is like a cloud of joy. The frosting is like a rainbow. One slice is heaven on Earth, The cake is like a cloud of joy. The frosting is like a …

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