When AI meets Poetry
Editor's note
Interdisciplinarity is a frontier topic in academic research. When different disciplines intersect, wonderful discoveries often follow.
In our #TsinghuaInterdisciplinarity series, let's start with AI. When AI meets poetry, what magical things will happen?
Dating back to 2015, poetry generation by AI was still a novel field with few researchers involved. With continuous efforts and seven years of development, the Jiuge human-machine collaborative system has been successfully developed to create gorgeous Chinese poems, which now favorably compare with human-written ones.
When a poem has been generated, Jiuge allows users to repeatedly revise unsatisfactory elements, and then the poem will be dynamically updated and regenerated in accordance to the revision. To some extent, the poem is written by the user and the system collaboratively.
Jiuge Team from the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at Tsinghua University (THUNLP) led by Prof. Sun Maosong
During this process, setbacks are inevitable. After all, After all, AI doesn't function in the same ways as human brains. To improve Jiuge, the biggest barrier fell on how to generate an adequate word to reflect various elements like emotions and originality.
According to the researchers, the team has tried to seek inspirations from other disciplines. For instance, referring to the critical theories in literature, they have made “Jiuge” avoid those ambiguous sentences and stick to the main theme.
“Only by intersecting knowledge of diverse fields can we sail through the wind and ocean.”
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Jiuge
Notably, Jiuge also achieved some unexpected effects. On the New Year’s Eve of 2022, a Chinese writer in Nigeria wrote a poem with the help of Jiuge to express his homesickness for the motherland, which brought great comfort to him. Besides, Jiuge is currently introduced to primary school and high school, serving as a practical and novel method for young generation to learn poetry. With the popularization of the program, it is integrating into people’s daily life and boosting the rejuvenation of Chinese traditional culture.
Holding the aspiration to bring illustrative ideas to the public, the team went on to perfect Jiuge’s functions and keep advancing in this field. The collision between AI and Chinese poetry is so splendid that endless possibilities are waiting to be discovered.
Scan the QR code / Visit the webiste and try Jiuge now!
Poem Writing
http://jiuge.thunlp.org/
Couplets
Search engine for analogous verse
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Innovative Tsinghua | When AI meets Poetry
Writer: Hua Yusi
Editors: Liu Zhaoxi, Liu Shutian
Designer: Hua Yusi
Reviewers: Lin Yuan, Xu Liang