“There Once Was a Really Bad Poet, It Was Automated but You Didn’t Know It”, Jianyou Wang, Xiaoxuan Zhang, Yuren Zhou, Christopher Suh, Cynthia Rudin2021-03-05 (, , ; backlinks; similar)⁠:

Limerick generation exemplifies some of the most difficult challenges faced in poetry generation, as the poems must tell a story in only five lines, with constraints on rhyme, stress, and meter.

To address these challenges, we introduce LimGen, a novel and fully automated system for limerick generation that outperforms state-of-the-art neural network-based poetry models, as well as prior rule-based poetry models. LimGen consists of 3 important pieces: the Adaptive Multi-Templated Constraint algorithm that constrains our search to the space of realistic poems, the Multi-Templated Beam Search algorithm which searches efficiently through the space, and the probabilistic Storyline algorithm that provides coherent storylines related to a user-provided prompt word.

The resulting limericks satisfy poetic constraints and have thematically coherent storylines, which are sometimes even funny (when we are lucky).

[Judging by the last author’s comments, the authors are apparently unaware that they are fighting BPE problems in GPT-2 and that is why GPT-2 doesn’t “want” to rhyme.]

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There Once Was a Really Bad Poet, It Was Automated but You Didn’t Know It