Rhetorically Controlled Encoder-Decoder for Modern Chinese Poetry Generation

Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1992–2001 Florence, Italy, July 28 - August 2, 2019. c⃝2019 Association for Computational Linguistics 1992 Rhetorically Controlled Encoder-Decoder for Modern Chinese Poetry Generation Zhiqiang Liu†, Zuohui Fu‡∗, Jie Cao♦∗, Gerard de Melo‡, Yik-Cheung Tam†, Cheng Niu† and Jie Zhou† †Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc, China ‡Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University ♦School of Computing, University of Utah zhiqliu@tencent.com,zuohui.fu@rutgers.edu,jcao@cs.utah.edu gdm@demelo.org,{wilsontam,niucheng,withtomzhou}@tencent.com Abstract Rhetoric is a vital element in modern poetry, and plays an essential role in improving its aesthetics. However, to date, it has not been considered in research on automatic poetry generation. In this paper, we propose a rhetor- ically controlled encoder-decoder for modern Chinese poetry generation. Our model relies on a continuous latent variable as a rhetoric controller to capture various rhetorical patterns in an encoder, and then incorporates rhetoric- based mixtures while generating modern Chi- nese poetry. For metaphor and personifica- tion, an automated evaluation shows that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin, while a human eval- uation shows that our model generates better poems than baseline methods in terms of flu- ency, coherence, meaningfulness, and rhetori- cal aesthetics. 1 Introduction Modern Chinese poetry, originating from 1900 CE, is one of the most important literary formats in Chinese culture and indeed has had a profound influence on the development of modern Chinese culture. Rhetoric is a vital element in modern poetry, and plays an important role in enhancing its aesthetics. Incorporating intentional rhetorical embellishments is essential to achieving the de- sired stylistic aspects of impassioned modern Chi- nese poetry. In particular, the use of metaphor and personification, both frequently used forms of rhetoric, are able to enrich the emotional impact of a poem. Specifically, a metaphor is a figure of speech that describes one concept in terms of an- other one. Within this paper, the term “metaphor” is considered in the sense of a general figure of ∗The work was done when Zuohui Fu and Jie Cao were interns at Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc. 独自 白云漫了太阳 青山环拥着正睡的时候 牛乳般雾露遮遮掩掩 像轻纱似的 幂了新嫁娘的面 (White clouds obscured the sun) (When the surrounding green hills are sleeping) (Milky fog and dew are partly hidden and partly visible) (Like a light yarn) (Cover the bride's face) (Alone) Personification Metaphor Figure 1: A modern Chinese poetry with metaphor and personification. speech 比喻 (bi yu), encompassing both metaphor in its narrower sense and similes. Personification is a figure of speech in which a thing, an idea or an animal is given human attributes, i.e., non- human objects are portrayed in such a way that we feel they have the ability to act like human be- ings. For example, 她笑起来像花儿一样 (’She smiles like lovely flowers’) with its connection between smiling and flowers highlights extraordi- nary beauty and pureness in describing the verb ’smile’. 夜空中的星星眨着眼睛 (’Stars in the night sky squinting’) serves as an example of per- sonification, as stars are personified and described as squinting, which is …

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