Controllable Ancient Chinese Lyrics Generation Based on Phrase Prototype Retrieving

Generating lyrics and poems is one of the essential downstream tasks in the NLP field. Current methods have performed well in some lyrics generation scenarios but need further improvements in tasks requiring fine control. We propose a novel method for generating ancient Chinese lyrics (Song Ci), a type of ancient lyrics that involves precise control of song structure. The system is equipped with a phrase retriever and a phrase connector. Based on an input prompt, the phrase retriever picks phrases from a database to construct a phrase pool. The phrase connector then selects a series of phrases from the phrase pool that minimizes a multi-term loss function that considers rhyme, song structure, and fluency. Experimental results show that our method can generate high-quality ancient Chinese lyrics while performing well on topic and song structure control. We also expect our approach to be generalized to other lyrics-generating tasks.