ByGPT5: End-to-End Style-conditioned Poetry Generation with Token-free Language Models

Jonas Belouadi, Steffen Eger


Abstract
State-of-the-art poetry generation systems are often complex. They either consist of task-specific model pipelines, incorporate prior knowledge in the form of manually created constraints, or both. In contrast, end-to-end models would not suffer from the overhead of having to model prior knowledge and could learn the nuances of poetry from data alone, reducing the degree of human supervision required. In this work, we investigate end-to-end poetry generation conditioned on styles such as rhyme, meter, and alliteration. We identify and address lack of training data and mismatching tokenization algorithms as possible limitations of past attempts. In particular, we successfully pre-train ByGPT5, a new token-free decoder-only language model, and fine-tune it on a large custom corpus of English and German quatrains annotated with our styles. We show that ByGPT5 outperforms other models such as mT5, ByT5, GPT-2 and ChatGPT, while also being more parameter efficient and performing favorably compared to humans. In addition, we analyze its runtime performance and demonstrate that it is not prone to memorization. We make our code, models, and datasets publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.406
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7364–7381
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.406
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.406
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonas Belouadi and Steffen Eger. 2023. ByGPT5: End-to-End Style-conditioned Poetry Generation with Token-free Language Models. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7364–7381, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ByGPT5: End-to-End Style-conditioned Poetry Generation with Token-free Language Models (Belouadi & Eger, ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.406.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.406.mp4