A Sentiment and Style Controllable Approach for Chinese Poetry Generation

Abstract

Sentiment and style control are two vital aspects in automatic poetry generation. Excellent Chinese classical poetry should express a certain emotion and embody a specific style at the same time. Existing work still has deficiencies in controlling sentiment and style simultaneously. To address above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel approach for Chinese classical poetry generation, which can generate sentiment-controllable and style-controllable poems. First, it classifies hundreds of thousands of poems by style, sentiment, format, and primary keyword. Then, it utilizes masking self-attention mechanism to associate multiple tags and verses. Besides, it can generate metrical rhyming verses with distinctive sentiment and style characteristics according to the tag-set and secondary keywords. Finally, this approach is applied in Chang Qing Yin, which can collaborate with users to polish generated poems, providing alternatives automatically. Experimental results show that our approach performs well in sentiment and style control, and quality of generated poems outperforms several strong baselines.