From Shakespeare to Li-Bai: Adapting a Sonnet Model to Chinese Poetry

From Shakespeare to Li-Bai: Adapting a Sonnet Model to Chinese Poetry Zhuohan Xie Jey Han Lau Trevor Cohn The University of Melbourne zhuohanx@student.unimelb.edu.au jeyhan.lau@gmail.com t.cohn@unimelb.edu.au Abstract In this paper, we adapt Deep-speare, a joint neural network model for English sonnets, to Chinese poetry. We illustrate the characteris- tics of Chinese quatrain and explain our archi- tecture as well as training and generation pro- cedure, which differs from Shakespeare son- nets in several aspects. We analyse the gen- erated poetry and find that the adapted model works well for Chinese poetry, as it can: (1) generate coherent 4-line quatrains of different topics; and (2) capture rhyme automatically to a certain extent. 1 Introduction Classical poetry is an important Chinese cultural heritage and holds great value. The most popular poetry type is quatrain. Table 1 shows a seven- character quatrain written by Li Bai, one of the most famous poets in Chinese history, which we will use to explain characteristics of Chinese qua- train. First, a Chinese quatrain must contain four sen- tences where each sentence has the same number (five or seven) of characters. Usually, these sen- tences follow the “introduction, follow-up, transi- tion and conclusion” mode, which means the first sentence starts a topic, the second continues it, then the third sentence extends it to a new realm and the last provides a summarisation (Wang, 2002). The rhythmic scheme in Chinese quatrain is simple: the last characters of the second and fourth sentences should rhyme. Optionally, the last character of the first sentence can also rhyme with them, as the qua- train shows in Table 1. As for tone, each character contains one single syllable and there are two tones for middle Chinese (Pulleyblank, 2011): “Ping” (level tone) or “Ze” (downward tone). Generally, tones at the same positions of two adjacent sen- tences are opposite and four common tonal pat- terns are illustrated in Wang (2002). Character 望庐山瀑布 【唐】李白 日照香炉生紫烟， * Z P P Z Z P 遥看瀑布挂前川。 * P * Z Z P P 飞流直下三千尺， * P * Z P P Z 疑是银河落九天。 * Z P P Z Z P Waterfall on Mount Lu Li Bai The Sunlit Censer peak exhales a wreath of cloud. Like an unpended stream the waterfall sounds loud. Its torrent dashes down three thousand feet from high. As if the Silver River fell from azure sky. Table 1: A 7-character Tang Quatrain by Li Bai. tone is indicated in Table 1 where ‘P’ indicates “Ping”, ‘Z’ refers to “Ze” and ‘*’ means this char- acter can be either tone. Following all these constraints, a well-written Chinese quatrain are full of rhythm while express- ing abundant emotions. 1.1 Motivation Inspired by Deep-speare (Lau et al., 2018), a joint neural network model that is trained on English sonnets to generate quatrains in iambic pentame- ter (Halle and Keyser, 1971), we seek to adapt this model to poetry in other languages. The abun- dance of Chinese quatrain and its important cul- tural status makes it a natural …

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