Rewriting Chinese Songs with Controllable Content and Rhyme Scheme

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Rewriting Chinese Songs with Controllable Content and Rhyme 
Scheme"

By

Mr. Yusen SUN


Abstract

Although lyrics generation has achieved significant progress in recent 
years, it has limited practical applications. The generated lyrics cannot 
be performed without composing compatible melodies. In this work, we 
bridge this practical gap by proposing a song rewriting system which 
rewrites the lyrics of an existing song such that the generated lyrics are 
compatible with the rhythm of the existing melody and thus singable. In 
particular, we propose SongRewriter, a controllable Chinese lyric 
generation and editing system which assists users without prior knowledge 
of melody composition in generating performable lyrics. The system is 
trained by a randomized multi-level masking strategy which produces a 
unified model for generating entirely new lyrics or editing a fragment 
under optional controlled conditions such as keywords and rhyme schemes. 
During inference, several decoding constraints are incorporated to improve 
rhyme control and rhyming word diversity. While prior metrics to evaluate 
rhyme quality are mainly designed for rap lyrics, we propose novel rhyme 
evaluation metrics for lyrics of songs. We conduct extensive experiments, 
and both automatic and human evaluations show that the proposed model 
performs better than the state-of-the-art models in terms of contents and 
rhyme quality.


Date:  			Thursday, 11 August 2022

Time:			10:00am - 12:00noon

Zoom Meeting:
https://hkust.zoom.us/j/92403866889?pwd=L1duNjk0ekRLdmNLL0JTNG11OC80QT09

Committee Members:	Prof. Dit-Yan Yeung (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Raymond Wong (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Yangqiu Song


**** ALL are Welcome ****