Acrostic Poem Generation
This work introduces a novel task in computational creativity for generating constrained poetry, but it is incremental as it builds on existing neural methods without achieving broad SOTA impact.
The authors tackled the problem of generating acrostic poems in English, a new task in computational creativity, by proposing a baseline model combining a conditional neural language model with a neural rhyming model, and found that the generated poems were well-received by humans without significant quality loss due to constraints.
We propose a new task in the area of computational creativity: acrostic poem generation in English. Acrostic poems are poems that contain a hidden message; typically, the first letter of each line spells out a word or short phrase. We define the task as a generation task with multiple constraints: given an input word, 1) the initial letters of each line should spell out the provided word, 2) the poem's semantics should also relate to it, and 3) the poem should conform to a rhyming scheme. We further provide a baseline model for the task, which consists of a conditional neural language model in combination with a neural rhyming model. Since no dedicated datasets for acrostic poem generation exist, we create training data for our task by first training a separate topic prediction model on a small set of topic-annotated poems and then predicting topics for additional poems. Our experiments show that the acrostic poems generated by our baseline are received well by humans and do not lose much quality due to the additional constraints. Last, we confirm that poems generated by our model are indeed closely related to the provided prompts, and that pretraining on Wikipedia can boost performance.