Learning English to Chinese Character: Calligraphic Art Production based on Transformer

We propose a transformer-based model to learn Square Word Calligraphy to write English words in the format of a square that resembles Chinese characters. To achieve this task, we compose a dataset by collecting the calligraphic characters created by artist Xu Bing, and labeling the position of each alphabet in the characters. Taking the input of English alphabets, we introduce a modified transformer-based model to learn the position relationship between each alphabet and predict the transformation parameters for each part to reassemble them as a Chinese character. We show the comparison results between our predicted characters and corresponding characters created by the artist to indicate our proposed model has a good performance on this task, and we also created new characters to show the “creativity” of our model.