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Can Machine Generate Traditional Chinese Poetry? A Feigenbaum Test

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Book cover Advances in Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems (BICS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10023))

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Abstract

Recent progress in neural learning demonstrated that machines can do well in regularized tasks, e.g., the game of Go. However, artistic activities such as poem generation are still widely regarded as human’s special capability. In this paper, we demonstrate that a simple neural model can imitate human in some tasks of art generation. We particularly focus on traditional Chinese poetry, and show that machines can do as well as many contemporary poets and weakly pass the Feigenbaum Test, a variant of Turing test in professional domains.

Our method is based on an attention-based recurrent neural network, which accepts a set of keywords as the theme and generates poems by looking at each keyword during the generation. A number of techniques are proposed to improve the model, including character vector initialization, attention to input and hybrid-style training. Compared to existing poetry generation methods, our model can generate much more theme-consistent and semantic-rich poems.

Q. Wang and T. Luo—The first two authors contributed equally.

D. Wang—RM 1-303, FIT BLDG, Tsinghua University, Beijing (100084), P.R. China. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under the project NO. 61371136, and the MESTDC PhD Foundation Project No. 20130002120011. It was also supported by Huilan Ltd. and FreeNeb.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://code.google.com/archive/p/word2vec/.

  2. 2.

    These experts are professors and their postgraduate students in the field of Chinese poetry research. Most of them are from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

  3. 3.

    http://duilian.msra.cn/jueju/.

  4. 4.

    The author of RNNPG [22] could not find the SMT model in the reproduction, unfortunately.

  5. 5.

    These experts were nominated by professors in the field of traditional Chinese poetry research.

  6. 6.

    These experts again are mostly from CASS, part of them attended the previous test.

  7. 7.

    The criterion is to fool people in more than 30% of the trials. Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test.

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Wang, Q., Luo, T., Wang, D. (2016). Can Machine Generate Traditional Chinese Poetry? A Feigenbaum Test. In: Liu, CL., Hussain, A., Luo, B., Tan, K., Zeng, Y., Zhang, Z. (eds) Advances in Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems. BICS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10023. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49685-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49685-6_4

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